Spam filters coast through Virus Bulletin test

Spam filters need to block junk messages and avoid 'false positives'

Anti-spam vendors received some good news yesterday with the release of the latest Virus Bulletin (VB) spam test.

The security publisher said that all 16 of the products passed the test and earned the VB certification.

The test pitted the spam filters against more than 250,000 legitimate and spam emails. Vendors were graded on the ability to block spam messages and avoid 'false positives' where legitimate emails are marked as spam.

Testers found that, even when the false positive rate was tripled and subtracted from the blocked rate, each of the products had a better than 96 per cent ranking.

Among the best performers were Symantec's Brightmail, Microsoft's Forefront, M86's MailMarshall and Sophos' Email Appliance.

However, VB test director Martijn Grooten warned that, while each of the tested products passed the certification, users should still be wary when purchasing security and anti-spam applications.

"This does not mean that no bad products exist. After all, we only test products that developers have chosen to submit to us," he said.

"But it does go to show that there is plenty of choice available to customers, as well as a healthy amount of competition for product developers."