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Will Amazon print it?
Amazon has blanked a few of my reviews, so on the off chance that this one doesn't make it, I'm posting a copy here:
Buggy, NO support, total ripoff (1 star, worst rating)
There's no way to tell you how bad this package is in only 1,000 words. 100,000 is more like it.
SpamKiller puts "spam" into a separate folder. However, McAfee's VirusScan flashes warnings for each piece of virus-infected email which arrives in that folder, even though they have already been decontaminated by VirusScan. On bootup, I was getting 88 or more meaningless virus alerts, requiring two clicks each to dismiss!
McAfee took more than a month to figure this out. I wasted over 30 hours online with their totally clueless techs before I finally realized that my system wasn't massively infected - the whole problem was that McAfee's two products were in conflict.
Later, email from the McAfee Escalation Team was blocked by their own SpamKiller software, because it "looked like spam". When I finally got in touch with an Escalation tech, he wrote that he needed to find an expert in SpamKiller to help me...that was on October 20th. It is now November 12, and there has still been no word. McAfee has taken over THREE weeks to find an expert in THEIR OWN SOFTWARE, and they STILL haven't found one! This is incredibly bad service.
SpamKiller was also really bad with spam. It let a LOT of spam through, even after I'd set up some specific filters...others have reported this filtering glitch. It also marked a lot of good email as spam. This was totally unacceptable, of course.
The entire methodology of SpamKiller is inferior, because it primarily relies on a centralized list. Once the spammers figure out a way through the McAfee-defined filters, the entire McAfee customer base is open to them for another mailing. Individually-developed Bayesian filtering programs are much superior, since they reflect the actual spam that the user receives and are therefore not subject to a universal spammer workaround. I uninstalled SpamKiller and have been using a free program that uses Bayesian filtering (POPfile), and after a week it is at 98% accuracy, with the balance of error on including spam in my inbox - which is much preferable to losing good mail. As I continue to use the program it continues to learn and adapt, too. I'm very pleased with it. It's remarkable easy to use, too.
SpamKiller was slow to respond to new email (sometimes I could see that new email had come in with webmail, but it took SpamKiller ten minutes or more to receive it), and slow to process mail, too.
WARNING: Once you give McAfee permission to "auto-renew" your account with your credit card, it is not easy to get them to stop. Some people have had to make all sorts of calls and complaints. It took me more than a week to get them to take my card off the account, so that I can let my McAfee account lapse.
Taken separately, VirusScan is not a bad program. I subscribed to it separately for many years. But thanks to my awful experience with SpamKiller 5.0 I'm dropping McAfee altogether. If you'd like to know more, email me. I've got some stories that are pretty funny, if you didn't have to pay $65.00 for the experience.
Buggy, NO support, total ripoff (1 star, worst rating)
There's no way to tell you how bad this package is in only 1,000 words. 100,000 is more like it.
SpamKiller puts "spam" into a separate folder. However, McAfee's VirusScan flashes warnings for each piece of virus-infected email which arrives in that folder, even though they have already been decontaminated by VirusScan. On bootup, I was getting 88 or more meaningless virus alerts, requiring two clicks each to dismiss!
McAfee took more than a month to figure this out. I wasted over 30 hours online with their totally clueless techs before I finally realized that my system wasn't massively infected - the whole problem was that McAfee's two products were in conflict.
Later, email from the McAfee Escalation Team was blocked by their own SpamKiller software, because it "looked like spam". When I finally got in touch with an Escalation tech, he wrote that he needed to find an expert in SpamKiller to help me...that was on October 20th. It is now November 12, and there has still been no word. McAfee has taken over THREE weeks to find an expert in THEIR OWN SOFTWARE, and they STILL haven't found one! This is incredibly bad service.
SpamKiller was also really bad with spam. It let a LOT of spam through, even after I'd set up some specific filters...others have reported this filtering glitch. It also marked a lot of good email as spam. This was totally unacceptable, of course.
The entire methodology of SpamKiller is inferior, because it primarily relies on a centralized list. Once the spammers figure out a way through the McAfee-defined filters, the entire McAfee customer base is open to them for another mailing. Individually-developed Bayesian filtering programs are much superior, since they reflect the actual spam that the user receives and are therefore not subject to a universal spammer workaround. I uninstalled SpamKiller and have been using a free program that uses Bayesian filtering (POPfile), and after a week it is at 98% accuracy, with the balance of error on including spam in my inbox - which is much preferable to losing good mail. As I continue to use the program it continues to learn and adapt, too. I'm very pleased with it. It's remarkable easy to use, too.
SpamKiller was slow to respond to new email (sometimes I could see that new email had come in with webmail, but it took SpamKiller ten minutes or more to receive it), and slow to process mail, too.
WARNING: Once you give McAfee permission to "auto-renew" your account with your credit card, it is not easy to get them to stop. Some people have had to make all sorts of calls and complaints. It took me more than a week to get them to take my card off the account, so that I can let my McAfee account lapse.
Taken separately, VirusScan is not a bad program. I subscribed to it separately for many years. But thanks to my awful experience with SpamKiller 5.0 I'm dropping McAfee altogether. If you'd like to know more, email me. I've got some stories that are pretty funny, if you didn't have to pay $65.00 for the experience.