My Google Alerts tossed me a new release relating to CipherTrust, a fairly well-known anti-spam provider. They're now offering a free toolbar for Outlook and Lotus Notes that promises to predict the probability that a message is a spam or a phishing attack. Apparently you'll also be able to report messages individually.

Truthfully enough, the company claims that this toolbar is the first of its kind. No other anti-spam vendor has even thought of making a toolbar! Well in my opinion, that's because no anti-spam vendor should think of making a toolbar. Honestly, if you need a toolbar to hog resources on each client just to stop spam that's getting through, that simply means that your appliance isn't stopping it on the server/appliance.

I would venture to say that this effort to differentiate themselves has only made them look incompetent. Sorry.

Here's a link to the toolbar download page.