Customer Reviews
Slow product. Awful support. 
2005-08-05
I have been using this product for 3 years. To obtain full functionality I also purchased the full edition of Outlook to use along with I Hate Spam.
At first I Hate Spam was moderately effective at filtering spam. It did catch 90% of the spam and almost never incorrectly classified a legitimate email as spam.
However it was also very slow. It took 5 minutes to process 75 incoming emails each morning, and dealing with the 10% of spam missed was extremely inefficient - manually designating a single email as spam would cause Outlook to lock up an agonizing 20 seconds. Designating multiple emails as spam was even more inefficient, and there were anoying limits on how many emails I could designate as spam in a single click.
Customer support was unresponsive to complaints about this product.
After the one year support period for this product elapsed, the performance recognizing spam dropped from adequate (90%) to pathetic (2%). When I purchased renewed support for the product the performance restored to adequate, and then again became pathetic after the expiration of the support window. I strongly suspect that there is a built-in expiration feature that causes this degredation in performance exactly after a year of use.
While I would have been happy to pay for this product as a subscription service, (particularly if it were better supported and not quite so slow), I think it is unethical for the publisher to market it as they do without disclosing the essentially MANDATORY support fees.
Lousy software, lousy service 2005-05-12
I bought this software and wish I hadn't. None of the tabs work and my friends, colleagues go to delete. I can't move them back using "not spam" or "add friend" buttons. Have written four emails to the company for help and received no replies.
Avoid this one
Excellent Program 
2004-12-16
This program is easy to install, works very well, and rapidly cleans out "in-box" junk. I receive 60-70 pieces of spam per day, and it processes them in approximately 20 seconds. The filtering accuracy rate is around 95%. Integrates very nicely with XP-Outlook-Norton, and is much more effective than Outlook 2003 as a stand alone.
The only issue I have encountered is the program is not designed to support multiple users signed on simultaneously. In XP this results in a blinking cursor. The cure is to log off when switching users. Support figuring out this "undocumented feature" was great.
Have recommended and this to family of friends, and is a welcome tool in the anti-spam crusade.
Spam?? What Spam?? 
2004-06-12
Since I started using this product I have no more spam and it never ever catches my good email. I get 300+ spam messages a day and it catches all of them. Awesome product, and it's dirt cheap!
Best Outlook anti-spam tool out there! 2004-06-12
iHateSpam not only blocks the lion's share of spam I receive, it also allows me to send a (convincing but fake) bounce message and/or report spam abuse to various authorities. iHateSpam also allows the user to easily tag a sender/domain as a friend or enemy and black/whitelist them accordingly. The program is easy to install and configure out of the box, and allows for extensive tweaking to make it work the way you want it to. As a network sysadmin who is very conservative about introducing new software in a corporate environment, I consider iHateSpam to be the most stable, user-accessible and empowering anti-spam software currently available, and have recommended it for corporate use without hesitation.
Solid 95% Spam Detection out of the box 2004-06-12
iHateSpam 4.0 helps you eliminate annoying spam, reduce irritating junk emails quickly and easily! Does not support AOL or Mac systems
Hate Spam - Love this product 2004-02-25
This product works great with Outlook - even from behind my company's firewall. There's hardly any installation, and it catches about 95% of the spam (about 75 a day for me).
I have noticed that my system has slowed down at times and even crashed on a few occassions, but this seems to be a common issue with spam software and has not been a real problem.
Easily worth the money - you can also try it out for free.
Not recommended 
2004-02-22
I used the 3.2 version of this product for some time and judged its performance to be adequate but not stellar for the single-PC user receiving a moderate volume of email. The program quickly learns to block a good percentage of spam but then never seems to get any smarter even when the subject lines are dead giveaways. All newsletters and some personal emails are blocked automatically, forcing you to check your "Quarantine" folder regularly for legitimate email, which then needs to be manually whitelisted. You have the option to report screening errors to Sunbelt Software, ostensibly to improve the product, but I see no evidence that anyone at the company pays attention. I have used free anti-spam products that are at least as effective as IHateSpam.
I recently had to upgrade my installation to the current version (4.0.426) because version 3.2 of IHateSpam did not get along with MS Office XP Service Pack 3. The spam screening performance of version 4.0 is on a par with that of the earlier version, i.e. so-so. But the new version takes a giant step back in another respect. The program creates three background processes that run in Windows all the time, even when Outlook is not running. These processes take up over 25 MB of memory! Even if you use IHateSpam's option to disable the program temporarily, these processes continue to run and take up your system's resources. Why anyone would design a spam filter to function this way is beyond me. I am downgrading my rating from 3 stars to a very generous 2.
I hate iHateSpam. Laughable "cust. Support", lousy product. 2004-02-15
I used iHateSpam version three and found it to be a marginal product. But when I was offered the online upgrade to version 4 I thought "why not, it's probably better now." Boy was I ever wrong. First, it's filtering is SLOW - slower than version three! Second, it takes way too many system resources, just try to multitask while it's doing it's filtering. Third, it hardly catches any blatent spam while putting more legitimate mail in Quarantine (yes, I've worked extensively with my friends and enemies lists, it just doesn't help). Fourth, when you try to get some help from tech support, you basically get none. They just spin you in circles without ever, EVER, addressing your issues. At this rate, they'll be toast soon. So, if you couldn't already tell, I would advise all to not even think about buying this product - you'll be much better off without it.
Lousy customer/tech service here! 2004-02-03
The program does a reasonable job of filtering spam, but the so called "bouncing" service is horrible. It freezes up my Microsoft Outlook constantly. Repeated emails to describe my problem sent to their techs have been ignored. I am very disappointed and may end up completely uninstalling this product. Definitely do NOT recommend this if you want a reliable, user-friendly, tech-supported anti-spam device! :-(
