Posted by Virus Bulletin on Jul 6, 2009
Two products achieve top level VBSpam Platinum award.
Virus Bulletin has announced the results of its second comparative review of anti-spam products, revealing two top-level awards.
Of the nine products tested, two achieved VBSpam Platinum certification awards, while one VBSpam Gold award and two silver-level awards were handed out.
VB's Anti-spam Test Director Martijn Grooten said: "We were pleased to see several of the products showing credible results and a picture is starting to emerge of which products are the high performers in this field."
The highest achievers were Messaging Architects' M+Guardian and Kaspersky Anti-Spam, both products being awarded certification at platinum level. UK company Giacom's hosted solution MessageStream achieved a gold-level award, while products from BitDefender, Fortinet and Webroot all reached the silver level.
However, Grooten said that developers would be unwise to rest on their laurels, saying: "Spam changes over time as spammers introduce new tricks and techniques in an attempt to bypass filters, so anti-spam vendors need to work hard to ensure their engines are up to date against the latest threats. It will be interesting to see whether this month's high performers can continue to impress in the forthcoming tests, as well as to see how other products improve."
The bimonthly VBSpam tests use Virus Bulletin's live email stream as well as a spam corpus provided by Project Honey Pot. The mail is sent to all the filters participating in the test in random order, thus exposing each to exactly the same email stream, in real time. The tests measure both the false positive rate and the spam catch rate of the products, and Platinum, Gold and Silver certifications are awarded based on products exceeding predefined benchmarks in both measurements.
Rather than awarding certifications based on products' absolute performance, the products are judged on their relative performance compared to those of their competitors: a VBSpam Platinum is awarded to products whose spam catch rate is twice as effective as the average in the test, and whose false positive rate is twice as low as the average in the test; a VBSpam Gold is awarded to products with a spam catch rate at least as high and a false positive rate at least as low as the average in the test, and a VBSpam Silver is awarded to products whose spam catch rate and false positive rates are no more than 50% worse than the average in the test.
The results of the July 2009 anti-spam comparative review can be seen here.
The full review, including detailed results tables, is available to Virus Bulletin subscribers in the July issue of Virus Bulletin.
VB's next anti-spam comparative review will take place in August, with the results published in September 2009. The deadline for product submission is 27 July. Any developers interested in submitting a product are encouraged to get in touch by emailing [email protected].
Posted on 01 July 2009 by Virus Bulletin
