Review: MailWasher Pro 6.5
Ian Waugh keeps his email free from spam
| Product | MailWasher Pro 6.5 |
|---|---|
| Company | Firetrust |
| Web | www.firetrust.com Download |
| Price | €29.95 |
| We like | Easy to use, supports multiple email accounts, it works brilliantly! |
| We don't like | Not Much! |
| Rating | 10/10 |
| Requirements | Windows XP, Vista (32- and 64-bit), and Windows 7 |
MailWasher is a spam filter. It works, quite simply, by reading your emails from the server and displaying their content and information. It identifies ones it thinks are spam and ones it thinks are from friends. You can check the list and delete the spammy one from the server so when you fire up your email program you only get the good emails. It's simple, it's easy and it works.
MailWasher has a learning feature that learns to recognise emails as good or bad when you define them as friend or foe. It also links to a large database of spam messages called First Alert so MailWasher users can help each other identify spam.
Wizard set up
The first thing to do is set up the email accounts you want MailWasher to monitor. You need to enter the POP3 and SMTP server details, and the account details and that's it. A Wizard will identify existing email accounts and help you set them up.
MailWasher's main window lists email details. You can decide which information to show and you might select columns such as Bounce, Delete, Action, Report, Status, Account, To, From and Subject. Let's see what this information tells us.
The To and From columns tell you who the email is addresses to and who it's from. You can often – but not always - spot spam because it's addressed to 'undisclosed recipients'. Sometimes you'll see a slight variation on your name. For example, if your email address is joeblogs@dynomail.com, spam might be addressed to joe2@dynomail.com which suggests that the spammers are working their way through all possible combinations of email addresses on dynomail.com.
The From column tells you who the email is from although it's easy to forge From addresses and you may have been on the receiving end of spam supposedly sent from your own email address!
The Subject is the title of the email and may provide clues as to its authenticity but, again, this is more likely to confirm it's from a friend rather than proving it's spam.
The Action column tells you whether MailWasher thinks the email is Good or Spam. You can click the button here to change the designation.
The Status column tells you the current evaluated status of the email. It will typically say Friend, Blacklisted or Possibly Legitimate.
A check box in the Report column will report the email as spam to the internet database. This helps build up records of spam mails so users can help each other.
Getting their own back
Checking the Delete column will, naturally, delete the email from the server. Checking the Bounce column will bounce the email back to the sender as if the email address did not exist. Although the instructions suggest you don't do this as it merely adds to useless internet traffic, if the spammer is savvy enough – and, it must be said, many aren't – then they should remove your address from their list as non-existent. But don't count on it. But at least it gives you a warm feeling that you're doing something and giving the spammers their own back!
The lower part of the MailWasher window shows the content of the email. If you're still not certain if an email is legitimate or not, this will usually help.
One neat feature here is that it tells you where links actually go to. For example, you might see a link in an email asking you to log into your PayPal account which looks like this:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run
However, MailWasher will tell you that if you click on the link you will actually go to a site like this (part of this has been blanked out to protect the guilty!):
[links to 121.242.xxx.xxx/www.paypal.com.us.cgi-bin.webscr.htm-cmd=_login-run.php] which clearly identifies it as a phisher.
So, given all of MailWasher's help along with this information, it's extremely unlikely that any spam will get through to your email client undetected.
After checking the emails in MailWasher and deciding which are naughty and which are nice, clicking on the Process Mail button will delete and bounce the naughty ones and you can then fire up your email program and download the nice ones.
Email alert
Good and bad emails are colour-coded and you can set MailWasher to automatically check your emails at specific intervals so it also acts as an email alert function.
If you have several googlemail or hotmail accounts, MailWasher has a great feature for you, almost a by-product of its operation.
You'll know that you can't open more than one googlemail account in a browser as they share the same cookies. There are fudges (use different types of browser, for example) but they leave much to be desired.
MailWasher can check multiple googlemail and hotmail address at the same time. You can see if you've any mail and then log into that account to check it.
So, is MailWasher perfect? Well, for spam prevention it pretty much is!
The only niggles I have – and these are churlish indeed - are best filed under 'features I'd like to see' rather than niggles with the program itself. The website has a section where you can suggest new features so they may make it into a later release.
There is a free version of MailWasher which only supports one email account and it does not support Hotmail. If you only have one email address, then go for it but most people now have several email addresses and for sheer functionality and convenience, MailWasher Pro is the one to go for. It has a 100% money-back guarantee so you've got nothing to lose – only spam!
Unreservedly recommended!
