Fight Spam with GFI MailEssentials

GFI MailEssentials is an effective anti-spam software package to fight against spam emails. It is fairly simple to set up and after tweaking and training it, it pretty much runs by itself. What I am going to talk about in this article is the feature which allows users to tune the Bayesian engine and blacklist spam emails via Outlook Public Folders.

Open GFI MailEssentials and you will see the filtering functions it provides listed on the left pane. (Figure 1)


Figure 1

From the list you can see GFI MailEssentials uses several filtering technologies to determine what is considered as spam and what is not, including anti-phishing, whitelist, DNS blacklist, custom blacklist, keyword checking, Bayesian analysis etc. Click on one of them and you can see detailed configuration options. (Figure 2)


Figure 2

You can choose to delete the spam or simply move it to the Junk Email folder.

GFI MailEssentials uses Bayesian technology to analyze the content of each message based on certain mathematical rules to decide if the mail is spam. It learns from the outbound email and adapts itself over time by learning about new spam and new valid email. For this feature to work efficiently, you need to train the Bayesian engine. After training it for a while, it results in a 98% spam detection rate.

GFI MailEssentials adds GFI AntiSpam Folders to client’s Outlook Public Folder. When a client receives spam emails in the inbox, he/she can simply drag the spam to This is spam email or Add to blacklist sub-folders. (Figure 3)


Figure 3

After GFI MailEssentials has processed the spam emails, it will put them to the Processed sub-folder.

You can check the detailed spam email detection rate from GFI MailEssentials reporters. (Figure 4, Figure 5, Figure 6)


Figure 4



Figure 5


Figure 6

It is as simple as that.