Mailwasher Pro ate my spam

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Manufacturer: Mailwasher
Price: $30
Requirements: Windows operating systems and environments
Web Site: WWW.FIRETRUST.COM

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A FEW MONTHS AGO we reviewed the free version of Mailwasher, and now have had a chance to look at and work with the one that costs - Mailwasher Pro.

Almost everyone we talk to has a problem with spam - even people who work in the corporate environment have these things littering up their inboxes.

Let's give you an example of how pernicious this problem is - although if you're reading this, you probably already know.

We switched off our BT Openworld email account while we were in Berlin, just for a few days, a week or so back. When we got back, we opened it up and out of over 1000 mails, 990 were spams, or contained viral or worm attachments.

That's simply unacceptable - BT Openworld not filtering some of this crap out is also unacceptable, but that's a different kettle of gefilte fish.

FEATURES
The "Pro" version of this software has a number of features over and above the free version of Mailwasher, which we reviewed here: MailWasher blackballs, blacklists the Spamsters.

When you set it up for your email account(s), you can choose how it will treat the incoming mail - whether it will apply "strong", "careful" or "no" marking, and also how it will display the emals.

MailWasher Pro: when you're cleaning Windows

You can also open a window to display the contents of a message, just in case you have a friend called Vic Prozac whose email you really, really want to read.

Course, the first time you fire up this kind of software, you're liable to get a huge list of emals that you have to carefully work through and mark as friendly or unfriendly. In the latter case, you can "blacklist" the email - it keeps a tab on those ones, so they're automatically tagged next time you start up.

There's also a useful filter scheme in the Pro version that will let you find key phrases in the emal and act accordingly - those might typically include Viagra, Vicodin, RX, Prozac and Valium, although the spamsters are well on this kind of easy filter - we've noticed emals with v.i.a.g.r.a, via gra and variations trying to make it through.

You just can't stop them all, in our experience.

Once you've used the software for a week or two, however, it snaffles up most of the obvious spams so you don't waste an hour and a half every morning wading through the absolute rubbish that's bound to slow you down while you try and read real email.

You can choose whether to "bounce" email as a default - we have this option switched off. We don't want to alert the spamsters that they're being sussed.

Of course there are emals and then there are real villainous emals which contain viruses or software nematodes, and you can also use the software to block this stuff too.

We've noticed that MailWasher has some difficulties with some emails that are obviously spamtastic - in a few cases you try to blacklist mails and it just won't. We're still trying to figure out why this is.

You don't have to blacklist emails - if when you're doing your morning chore you decide you don't really want emails although they're not spam, you can delete them at the MailWasher stage, and they won't show in your inbox when you fire that up.

We're aware that there's a whole heap of other anti spam software out there - but we quite like this one, and having done our washing up regularly for some weeks now, we're not sure we want to start all over again.

The software works under Windows versions back to Win95, and there is codeweavers Wine port for Linux for the freeware version.

As there doesn't seem to be any kind of coordinated anti-SPAM push worldwide, we fear that you'll be forced to use this, or any of the other anti-SPAM software around for a fair old while yet.

It's a nuisance to have to use software like this, but if you want to use email these days, seems like you'll just have to plump for some filtering software either on your server itself or at the client end. µ