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Mailwasher Pro 3.4

Kill that spam! Kai Chandler reviews Mailwasher Pro.

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 from Firetrust as the best for me.

Here’s what I was looking for:

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 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).

In operation, Mailwasher Pro is very straightforward and apart from specifying your mail account details, works out of the box. There are really only two steps: Check 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. You may spot an item from a friend – just press + to mark it as such and the mail becomes available to send onto your mail client.  Mailwasher Pro has a clear display of all the emails you can sort them, read them and define actions you wish.   In use Mailwasher becomes better and better with time as it remembers what you tell it about what is mail and what is spam,

Process: It only takes action when you select the Process Mail  button. It deletes what needs to be deleted and sends the rest to your mail client.  So, the good news is that spam and viruses are deleted from your mailbox and not downloaded to your computer!

To sum up, Mailwasher Pro is a great weapon in the fight against spam!

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Kai Chandler

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