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PC Magazine Editor's Choice

Vanquish anti-spam solution wins PC Magazine Editor's choice award

Last Autumn, following the demise of the Mailblocks mail service, I was forced to look around for a replacement personal spam filter. This is because I'm still working on developing my own spam filter, and currently rank #1 out of over 50 million results on Google.co.uk for the term spam filter. Check it for yourself.

My requirements were for something which worked on a server rather than my PC as I want spam free email when I'm reading mail on the web or via my mobile. I also wanted something that didn't depend exclusively on challenge response as with Mailblocks I was forever having to clear out the legitimate mail from the spam folder as few legitimate mailers were bothering to answer the challenge. Mailblocks had a great user interface but a not so hot business model.

Although there are a number of established solutions for enterprise anti-spam software, the options for the person wanting a single user spam filter to protect one or two POP3 or IMAP accounts for their own personal use are a bit more limited. After a bit of searching however I came across a conference on handling spam at MIT, the highly respectable technology research facility in Cambridge, Massachusetts - a place I know having visited Cambridge MA when I was over in the US on business with Digital and which also currently hosts my soc.culture.scottish FAQ archive.

Connected with this conference were Vanquish Labs, who I looked up and was surprised to see a company who not only understood the problem of spam but who were then applying this knowledge across a range of solutions from the personal account I was looking for, right through to enterprise solutions.

In addition to signing up for their service, we agreed to work together on a competition to win spam free accounts and things have moved forward significantly since last Autumn. I guess I can spot a great piece of software when I see one and having now helped to develop some of the Vanquish software, I'm pleased to see them finally getting some recognition by recently winning the PC Magazine Editor's choice award. I mentioned the Editor's choice award on my technology blog and you can find more info there about the award. As they wrote in the review This product just keeps getting better. In the meantime, if you want to see what PC Magazine liked so much, why not visit the Vanquish.com website and see for yourself?


Last updated: 30 May 2006. Craig Cockburn.