Vade Retro Desktop 4.0

Bedeviled by spam? Looking for an antispam tool that will make it just go away? Vade Retro Desktop 4.0 ($24.69/year, direct) aims to be that tool. It's an attractive package with some unusual features, but in my testing its performance didn't live up to its good looks.

Straightforward Setup
Vade Retro filters POP3 and IMAP accounts and specifically supports Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express / Windows Mail, and Windows Live Mail. During setup you can choose to activate its protection for any one of these, or for all three. After installation a simple initialization wizard offers to import your recent correspondents into the "green list" (what others might call a whitelist). The wizard will optionally send a test message that should be flagged as spam, so you can immediately see that the tool is working.

Most spam filters simply dump all unwanted mail into a single spam folder. Some distinguish spam from phishing mail, or use one folder for definite spam and another for suspected spam. Vade Retro goes all out, with four different folders for different types of unwanted mail.

Advertisements get their own folder, as do virus-infested messages. Delivery notification failed "bounce" messages go into a third folder. All other unwanted mail goes into one marked "Unwanted Messages." For testing purposes I discarded the bounce and virus messages.

Thorough Integration
Vade Retro integrates very thoroughly with the three email clients it supports. A toolbar lets you flag any valid mail that was marked as spam, or flag advertising or unwanted mail that wasn't filtered. One button displays the total number of messages processed; clicking it brings up a very detailed chart of valid messages, spam, and ads received over a user-specified time period.

Full integration means it's easy to have Vade Retro scan a folder even after messages have been downloaded. That came in handy in my testing. I initially let the program process a spam-infested email account that had been idle for several months. Downloading the over 30,000 messages from this account took overnight.

I could see at a glance that Vade Retro hadn't scanned most of the messages, perhaps because of the huge volume at once. Fortunately, all I had to do was select the Inbox and click Scan on the toolbar. It took another couple hours, but Vade Retro properly scanned the already-received mail. I don't imagine any normal user would run into this fluke behavior.

Integration also means that the filter can detect when you move messages between folders. If you move mail from a spam folder to another folder, that may be a sign that you don't think it's spam. On detecting such a move it offers to treat the messages as legitimate and send them for analysis, to help refine the spam filter. By the same token, if you move messages from the Inbox to a spam folder the program can treat them as if you clicked the "Mark Spam" button.

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