As Spam Inspector says when one selects Tools, Message Rules, Mail:

If you don't make any changes to that Message Rule, spam messages are automatically moved to the Deleted Items folder, where they show up in Red, with **SPAM: in front of the Subject.

You will note that there are 8 items in my Deleted Items folder. Six were flagged by Spam Inspector as spam. The two items in my Deleted Items file that are in black, from Josh and from Fernanda, were not caught by Spam Inspector, but I highlighted them and clicked Is Spam in the Spam Inspector Toolbar, and it moved them to my Deleted Items file, and added them to my "Enemies List". Future messages from people in my Enemies List will automatically be quarantined without checking any additional rules.

By the same token if Spam Inspector identified something as Spam that should not have been considered that way, I could highlight it and click Not Spam, and it would automatically add them to my Friends List, and messages from people in my Friends List are skipped over without being scanned, and hence they will not be considered spam in the future.

One can select how to treat messages from Friends and Enemies by clicking on Spam Inspector:

and selecting Options, and then scrolling down to Is Spam & Not Spam.

Note that some of the greyed out actions are marked not supported (at least not in the Outlook Express version).

You can block all email in particular foreign character sets, and/or block all email from specific countries.

When I am working on my computer, every time my computer checks my email, and if it contains spam, a pop-up window appears above my clock and systray (the right side of the Windows toolbar):

It remains there for a few seconds and then disappears automatically, and I hear the chime from Outlook Express that says I have new email. The only "problem" I can see with Spam Inspector is that if all of the email messages captured on a mail run are spam (which frequently happens), I still hear the "new email" chime. However I can easily live with that. What I did was suppress the "Quarantine Taskbar Popup" in the Options / Quarantine Settings of Spam Inspector, and in Outlook Express I went to Tools, Options, General Tab and unclicked Pay sound when new messages arrive. Then I periodically look at my Outlook Express screen and see which folders have bold black folder names, i.e. in this example I have two unread messages in my Inbox, both which happen to be spam which Spam Inspector did not identify, two unread messages in my APCUG folder, one unread message in my Personal folder, and one unread message in my TCS folder. The reason some of those new messages are in other folders, rather than in my Inbox, is that I use Outlook Express Message Rules to automatically move messages from people who send me many messages, directly to the folder where I save messages from them.

I could have removed even those spam messages by adjusting the Spam Detection Thresholds. I could have told it to eliminate All Spam! which quarantine all junk mail and most opt-in marketing and newsletters, but that would run the highest risk of potentially quarantining some legitimate emails. I could even have checked the box marked Exclusive option which would only accept messages from people on my Friends List, but this is not recommended, because if one of my friends changed his email address, the only way I could continue to received email from him, would be if he used the old address to send me his new address, and if I then added that new address to my Friends list before he started sending email using that address. Most people don't think to do that; when they change email addresses they usually use the new address to send a message to people they correspond with saying change my address from old address to this address.

Spam Inspector has the ability to bounce selected mail messages back to the sender, which will send an 'address not found' message to the address that the message originated from, as if it came from the POSTMASTER email address from my ISP, to reduce the possibility of more junk mail coming from this address, because their targeted mailing list manager thinks my address was invalid. I seldom use this feature, because most spammers forge or fake their email address. I can tell this because of the large number of messages I get back from POSTMASTER email addresses, supposedly from messages I sent, which I never sent. For example, I tried using it for this review, and got:

Here is another one that could not be bounced:

Some spamers just can't be blocked:

Spam Inspector seems to me to be a very good product, and I highly recommend it. Their License Agreement for the Outlook Express edition of Spam Inspector also allows me to run the Outlook and AOL editions on one machine with no additional costs. I can also make a second copy of the software for use on one portable computer, so long as I am the primary user of the software and I am only running one copy of the software at the same time. And when you buy the Spam Inspector you get free upgrades for the software from the time of your purchase for an entire year, and Spam Definition updates for LIFE.

Note the Spam Inspector for Outlook Express does NOT support HTTP or IMAP based email accounts including HOTMAIL or MSN through a web browser.

After installing Spam Inspector and writing this article, I left the computer to go get something to eat, watch some television, and go to bed. In the morning, after breakfast, I came back in (about 12 hours later), and was very pleased to see that I only had 6 messages that I needed to look at. One was legitimate, one was questionable, and four were clearly spam. I then took a look at my Deleted Items file, and there were about 160 messages that Spam Inspector had identified as spam. I flagged one of them as Not Spam. Technically I guess it really was, since it was just a general ad from my ISP, Cox Communications, but they don't send me that many messages, and I was willing for them to send me email occasionally, since there might be something in it which would be of interest to me. I guess more send Spam during the daytime than in the evening, because during the next 12 hours Spam Inspector found 196 Spam messages.

If you look at this graph (maintained automatically by Spam Inspector), the red area represents spam messages deleted by Spam Inspector, and the green area represents email messages left to me to review. Some of them were also spam, but it was certainly easier to just handle them, than to have had to handle the red ones also. In particular you may want to check the Virus Protection article; many, but certainly not all, of the messages I received with virus's in them were not caught by Spam Inspector, because they were not sent by a spammer's email program, but rather by an individual's system that was infected by a virus.

Spam Inspector may not have caught all of the spam messages I received, but as you can see from the graph it caught an average of 422 spam messages each day, and a total of 6339 spam messages since I installed it. It definitely was worth installing.

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