Fed up with spam? Then you need a spam blocker.

Kai Chandler reviews Mailwasher Pro for Surfcontrols.com

 

Product:	Mailwasher Pro 5.0 anti spam software
From:	Firetrust Ltd
Web:	Mailwasher Free Trial
Price:	$37 USD
Rating:	9/10
Requirements:	Windows 95, 98, NT 4, ME, 2000 or XP
We like:	Works with any mail client
We don't like:	Not much – but it would be better to have ability to backup settings

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We are all fed up with spam, and despite recent initiatives to make it illegal, it’s likely to get worse before it gets better.  Perhaps I’m unlucky but my inbox gets around 150 emails a day and they are almost all spam.

Determined to do something about it, I tested a whole bunch of spam filters before settling on Mailwasher Pro anti spam software from Firetrust as the best for me.

Here’s what I was looking for in a spam blocker:

Supports unlimited email accounts. With a family of four, we have dozens of email addresses. It’s important to us to have a single view of inbound emails across all the email addresses.

Supports multiple mail clients

There’s a number of excellent filters that work only with Microsoft’s Outlook email client but I use a variety of other mail clients such as Mozilla Thunderbird, Ameol and The Bat.   I wanted a filter that would support whatever mail client I want to use.

Lets me get under the covers

Some filters are just a black box – they stop mail and that’s it. The risk is that mail you want to read is blocked without you even knowing it. I really wanted a filter that would let me define my own filtering rules.

Has a user-definable whitelist and blacklist

It’s important to be able to define your own blacklist of email addresses and domains to be blocked. And also, to define your friends’ email addresses into a friends list, commonly called a white list.

Supports spam blacklists

The nature of spam is that one email is sent to many recipients. If a recipient identifies it as spam to a blacklist server, then later recipients will have that item pre-identified as spam, or the sender identified as a spammer and his mails so identified. This is great in theory but in practice, legitimate organisations and senders can wrongly be identified as spammers. I wanted the ability to define which blacklists are used.

The good news is that Mailwasher meets these criteria really well.

-          It supports any mail client because it works straight onto your mailbox – just like the mail client you use. Your mailbox can be POP3, AOL, IMAP or Hotmail.

-          The filtering is extremely flexible. You can set up a list of keywords that guarantee a mail will be allowed through, but you can also set complex conditions using ‘regular expressions’ which is effectively a powerful rule language. 

-          You can define exactly what blacklists to use (if any).

-          Wizards help you easily set up multiple, in fact, unlimited email accounts, with all mail appearing in a single view.

In operation, Mailwasher Pro is very straightforward and apart from specifying your mail account details, works out of the box. You can have it running in five minutes.

There are really only three steps: Check, Mark and Process.

Check: Mailwasher Pro can be set to startup with Windows. It checks each of your mail accounts every few minutes and lists all the mails. It marks each mail item according to whether it is friendly, blacklisted because of its origin, contains a virus, or is a possible spam. A set of default actions is selected for any spam mail – delete, bounce and blacklist but you can easily change the action for an individual mail.

Some Facts about Spam and Viruses   Spam won't decrease any time soon, it's a profitable business.   Pornographic spam is the fastest increasing spam.   95% of all viruses are sent through email.   Most spam is fraudulent.   Spam is a huge waste of resources and time.   By 2005, the average user will receive 1600 pieces of spam a year.   The love bug virus cost the US economy an estimated $8.7 billion worth of damage.    damage.

Mark: This step is optional – you can finetune Mailwasher’s selection by ‘teaching’ it about any mistakes it makes in its decision. For example, you may spot an item from a friend – just press + or select Learn to mark it as such and the mail becomes available to send onto your mail client.  Mailwasher Pro has a clear display ink for your Free 30 day Trial! 

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Spector Pro 5.0 - surveillance software that monitors and records every detail of Internet browsing and chat activity.

ZoneAlarm 6.5 - In view of the many threats on the internet, a top internet security suite providing firewall, antispyware and antivirus with minimal overhead and automatic updating is a must.  ZoneAlarm Security Suite 6.5 includes all this as well as parental internet and popup filters.  It’s great value compared with buying individual tools and with main competitors McAfee and Norton. 

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