It runs in parallel with your normal mail program. You turn off your mail’s server’s automatic mail pick up, to give itna chance to look at the mail first. It decides which is spam and which is not, based on words in the subject and body of the message. You can also specify that some words are merely indicative, not proof of spam. It will maintain lists of known spammers and known friends. It then deletes the spam from your server. Then, you tell your mail program to pick up the mail, and it picks up just the spam-free mail from the server.

Advantages

• Intuitive and easy to use once you understand the basic principles it works on.
• Eudora has similar filters, but they don’t always work.
• Spam Detective is very quick to set up a filter for a word or sender.
• The author of the program rapidly answers the questions you send to him.
• you can keep your same email account.
• The virus-infected attachments on spam are never downloaded.

Disadvantages

• It is somewhat clumsier dealing with two mail control programs (e.g. Spam Detective plus Eudora) instead of one.
• You pick up your spam free mail twice, though spam detective only picks up the first 8K to examine. This can also be considered an advantage if you get long spams, because you get rid them without downloading them in their entirety.
• It is an extra cost.
• Spam Detective does not learn from what you delete. It only filters what you tell it to.
• You are an island. None of the experience of others in collecting spam lists has any effect on what is considered spam in your machine.
• It has an annoying bug. If new mail arrives while you are marking messages for deletion, it discards all your markings. The author says this will be fixed in the next release.