Security features
Protecting against the many hazards of the internet.
All the applications featured in this Roundup provide different tools and solutions to safeguard your privacy of your communications and the safety of your machines. In addition to the default settings, most also offer additional mechanisms to protect you with the aid of plug-ins.
You have the choice of using Bogofilter or SpamAssassin to detect and eliminate spam messages when working with Evolution, KMail and Claws. With Claws, the core package includes several useful plug-ins including Bogofilter, but if you’ve installed it using your distribution’s software management utility, you must additionally install the claws-mail-plugins package.
KMail’s anti-spam and anti-virus wizards help you to configure the respective tools. You must already have the tools installed to handle these operations, such as Bogofilter or ClamAV. If no tools are found, the wizard will merely inform you so. It doesn’t recommend any tools. Some users have reported problems with the wizard detecting their anti-virus tools. Worse still, when connected with an anti-virus utility, KMail’s performance is considerably slower, as each message is scanned for viruses.
Thunderbird has an advanced junk mail filter, which learns and improves its filtering depending on what you mark as spam. All incoming messages pass through the filter, and you can get Thunderbird to warn you about potential phishing emails, and also when a link in a message is leading you to a website other than the one indicated in the URL.
With the exception of Mailspring, all the clients can be configured to work with a spam detection and encryption, via the popular GnuPG utility.