My Pick For Best Spam Filter

I’ve used a lot of spam filters — both free and paid — and for the money my recommendation for the best email spam filter would be Cloudmark.

There are basically three types of spam filtering.

1. Blacklist / Keyword filter

This is the oldest and simplest type of spam detection. You set up a list of bad email addresses and / or bad keywords and if the email contains any of them then it gets flagged as spam.

2. Heuristic Detection

Most modern spam detection programs use heuristic algorithms to “learn” patterns as to what is considered to be a spam email.

Over time the program learns about spam and detection rates and accuracy goes up.

3. Group Consensus

Cloudmark uses a unique type of spam detection. It is based upon the notion that other people have probably received the same spam email so the Cloudmark software is in constant contact with a centralized spam database.

It works remarkably well and what I like best about Cloudmark is the very simple interface and that it is relatively lightweight.

Other spam filtering software I’ve used are often very slow and intrusive to the email program. More than one spam filtering program I’ve used actually locked up my Outlook and I had to uninstall the program to get my email working again.

Currently Cloudmark goes for about $40 / year and that allows you to install it on two computers.

You can try out Cloudmark for a 15 day free trial at their website www.cloudmark.com.

Removing Udchniv and Atthdop Spyware

These two particular strains of spyware have an interesting defense strategy. However, let me first describe the symptoms of these spyware programs.

1) Add / Remove Programs closes after a few seconds.
2) msconfig and regedit programs close after a few seconds.
3) Google search for keywords like SuperAntiSpyware and udchniv causes the Internet Explorer browser to close.
4) Attempting to run Malwarebyte’s mbab-setup.exe program does nothing.
5) Attempting to run SuperAntiSpyware installation or application either fails or causes some kind of system error.

If you notice these systems on your computer, then you may have been infected with udchniv or atthdop.

The good news is that they are easy to cleanup with Malwarebyte’s Anti-Malware. However, you have to do a couple of tricks to outsmart the spyware.

First, you need to rename the mbab-setup.exe program to something else like abc.exe. This is because the spyware is actively running and causes mbab-setup.exe to abort. By renaming the setup program you can get around this defense.

Second, once Mal’s program is installed you also have to rename the application file. This is located at C:\Program Files\Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware\.

The file you need to rename is mbab.exe. Rename it to something like xyz.exe and then run that program. This will allow you to run the full Malwarebyte’s Anti-Malware program which is able to remove the udcniv and atthdop spyware.

If after running Mal’s you still have problems, repeat the same technique with SuperAntiSpyware and spyware should be removed completely.