How does PerfectMail compare to SpamAssassin™?

Unlike Many Competing Products, PerfectMail Is Not SpamAssassin™
PerfectMail is a completely new anti-Spam and anti-Virus filter built from first principles to be the fastest, most effective and most accurate antispam filter on the market. PerfectMail is a completely new and original work designed to address the deficiencies in current mail filtering technology.

Most commercial antispam filters are based on and/or include significant portions of the Open Source SpamAssassin project. Below is a brief assessment of SpamAssassin's weaknesses. PerfectMail does not suffer from any of these deficiencies.

SpamAssassin Deficiencies

SpamAssassin is an good tool for stopping obvious spam but it does suffer from a number of deficiencies:

1. False Positives

   SpamAssassin does not retain information about past e-mails so it cannot improve its decision making by consulting e-mail history. Since SpamAssassin is solely focused on finding Spam, it can and will occasionally tag your legitimate e-mail as unwanted. The result is incorrectly categorized or lost business e-mail.

2. Open Source

   Don't get us wrong, we love Open Source. Problem is, so do Spammers. Spammers spend a great deal of time and effort examining SpamAssassin to see how it works - and how to defeat it (and they do defeat it). The result is that SpamAssassin goes through cycles of being more effective or less effective as SpamAssassin developers and spammers engage in a game of one-up-man-ship.

   So, to remain effective, an antispam tool must not give away its strategies and techniques.

3. Programmed In Perl

   Perl is a great scripting tool. It is easy to use, very feature rich and can be used to develop powerful applications. But, it is interpreted so it is much slower than compiled languages.

   We developed PerfectMail in C so that it would be fast. C's native, compiled code is 100-times faster (or more) than the same code written in Perl. This means that PerfectMail can deploy on lower cost hardware and provide higher overall performance than SpamAssassin based solutions.

4. High Maintenance

   SpamAssassin relies on hundreds of reasonable tests. These tests are run against a piece of e-mail and produce a rating of the spamishness of the e-mail. Mail administrators are expected to install, configure, and fine tune SpamAssassin for their environments.

   SpamAssassin seems to require ongoing administrative attention to keep it working optimally. The result is that your company's e-mail administrator must take the time to understand SpamAssassins suite of tests, make best-guess settings for each test and hope the result works properly.

5. Analysis Paralysis

   SpamAssassin contains an enormous number of tests. We believe that SpamAssassin contains the largest number of reasonableness tests of any antispam product available. The problem is - these tests take time to execute. When mail volumes are high, the large number of tests that SpamAssassin uses can slow down mail delivery or even overwhelm your server.

   The second problem is with the thinking behind adding more tests. The belief is that "if we can just add a few more tests - we can completely eliminate Spam". The truth is, reasonableness tests will only take you so far. After that, they offer little marginal benefit and cost you plenty in overhead and performance.

   PerfectMail employs the right (most effective tests), implemented the right (most efficient) way, and uses techniques not found in SpamAssassin. The result is a faster, more effective and more consistent solution.