Mailwasher

Good bit of anti-spam software. Simple, and it works, and believe it or not, it is reducing the amount of spam I'm actually receiving!! Must be good. Go on, give it a try. Tell 'em Rob sent you.

Mailwasher

I would love this program if it did SSL. The only account which has mucho spam is my school account and mailwasher does me no good if i can use it on that.

I've been using it for only a few days, but some of the senders (such as the grad school I haven't attended in over a year) are still sending. I have high hopes though,.

However - as far as the program sending back "no such user" type messages, since the mail server they're on has already accepted the messages and indicated that the address IS in fact valid, my question is - does the program really accomplish anything?

I can't tell you whether or not it's effective, but very few mail servers refuse to accept mail because the recipient doesn't exist anymore. Folks felt that telling you that a user doesn't exist is telling you that a user does exist when you get one that's not rejected, and they continued to feel that that was a security issue (cf. SMTP VRFY command). Not to mention the multi-layered email solutions these days that prevent the initial receiving server from even knowing if it's a valid recipient in the first place, so that sort of after-the-fact rejection is common, probably more common than the SMTP server saying that the address is invalid.

I can tell you that many legitimate pieces of mailing list software can and do interpret these rejections to remove dead addresses from their lists. As to whether spammers and their software do the same thing, I couldn't say.

I use mailwasher and have found it to be straight forward and effective. I particularly like the ability to preview the potential "junk" mail and delete and bounce back an "unable to deliver" message without downloading the message. I sometimes use a very slow cellular data connection. Downloading junk mail slowly just raises your stress level and cellular telephone bill!

Michael

I don't like that I have to manually press the process button each time I want it to launch or otherwise tell my mail client to go fetch the cleaned mail.

I have also found software which should be a lot better. Just haven't set it up yet... Popfile (http://sourceforge.net/projects/popfile/) is one such processor.

Bruno

Works great for my home account. I wish I could find something like this that would work with the ms-exchange servers at work (unfortunatly the admins wont allow me pop access to them).

Thanks for the tip!

You could take a look at POPFile which is one of the Bayesian stats based filters. It's name makes it sound like it requires POP3 to work, but someone has come up with an Outlook add-in that then plugs into POPFile, meaning that you can use it with Exchange.

The main POPFile site is here:

http://popfile.sourceforge.net/

The details on the Outlook add-in are here:

http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=801506&forum_id=226152

N.B. I have not used POPFile myself for more than a day or so, because I do my spam filtering on my server using Bogofilter http://bogofilter.sourceforge.net/