I've used Spamnet since its early days (9 or so months now).
While it used to work great - and certainly a no-brainer to install and configure - its effectiveness in the past few weeks (since they announced that they were going to charge) has decreased dramatically - so much so that I am looking for another solution as SpamNet just doesn;t cut it anymore.
For those who don't know, what they have done is allow us beta testers to con tinue to use the last beta version, and are only charging new users and those of us who choose to upgrade. I can't fault this, but the dramatic drop-off in detection rates seems way too linked to the charging announcement to ignore. Either:
* the userbasxe (who classify the spam) has dropped off a cliff since they announced charging, or
* they have reduced the effectiveness of the filters to get me to upgrade.
I suspect the first option, but whichever it is - I can only say don;t use Spamnet at the moment.
Hopefully it will improve, but right now I am looking for another option.
Actually, having recently used IE, Mozilla 1.1b and Opera 6 (Win XP, moderately new laptop) - I have to say that Opera was noticeably speedier than the other two, both in loading and rendering.
That didn't stop me uninstalling it this morning though - simply because it could not render several of the pages I often visit! As a Mozilla user, I am used to and ignore small imperfections in pages written for IE users - however Opera just made web-surfing too difficult. For example, I could not log into my webmail account (invalid session error). When you added that to the huge amount of ordinary web pages that simply loaded in an illegible state - it had to go and I have reverted to Moz, despite its bloat.
Don't get me wrong, I am all for standard-setting by committee rather than market-share. I know how much Mozilla has agonised over this problem, but I cannot use a product that renders web pages badly, however quickly - especially if they are web pages that Mozilla can render without a quirk (ahem).
This is the path I would take. The UK's Open University (www.open.ac.uk) - which was founded in the 1960s by the British Government to pioneer distance-learning courses - takes students from Switzerland for all its courses.
The degrees - both arts and scientific - you get from the OU certainly are not "toy" degrees - they are run and marked by top academics, and given full weight by (UK) HR deptartments. For example, the OU regularly wins prizes for the quality of its students. It also has taken great pains to combat the disadvantages of distance learning by encouraging online collaboration.
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I've used Spamnet since its early days (9 or so months now).
While it used to work great - and certainly a no-brainer to install and configure - its effectiveness in the past few weeks (since they announced that they were going to charge) has decreased dramatically - so much so that I am looking for another solution as SpamNet just doesn;t cut it anymore.
For those who don't know, what they have done is allow us beta testers to con tinue to use the last beta version, and are only charging new users and those of us who choose to upgrade. I can't fault this, but the dramatic drop-off in detection rates seems way too linked to the charging announcement to ignore. Either:
* the userbasxe (who classify the spam) has dropped off a cliff since they announced charging, or
* they have reduced the effectiveness of the filters to get me to upgrade.
I suspect the first option, but whichever it is - I can only say don;t use Spamnet at the moment. Hopefully it will improve, but right now I am looking for another option.
That didn't stop me uninstalling it this morning though - simply because it could not render several of the pages I often visit! As a Mozilla user, I am used to and ignore small imperfections in pages written for IE users - however Opera just made web-surfing too difficult. For example, I could not log into my webmail account (invalid session error). When you added that to the huge amount of ordinary web pages that simply loaded in an illegible state - it had to go and I have reverted to Moz, despite its bloat.
Don't get me wrong, I am all for standard-setting by committee rather than market-share. I know how much Mozilla has agonised over this problem, but I cannot use a product that renders web pages badly, however quickly - especially if they are web pages that Mozilla can render without a quirk (ahem).
cheers
drew
This is the path I would take. The UK's Open University (www.open.ac.uk) - which was founded in the 1960s by the British Government to pioneer distance-learning courses - takes students from Switzerland for all its courses.
The degrees - both arts and scientific - you get from the OU certainly are not "toy" degrees - they are run and marked by top academics, and given full weight by (UK) HR deptartments. For example, the OU regularly wins prizes for the quality of its students. It also has taken great pains to combat the disadvantages of distance learning by encouraging online collaboration.
Drew