Review: Mailwasher Pro 5
Looking for a spam blocker? Kai Chandler reviews Mailwasher Pro anti spam software
| Product | Mailwasher Pro 5 |
|---|---|
| Company | Firetrust Ltd |
| Web | www.firetrust.com Download |
| Price | $37 |
| We like | Works with any mail client - POP3, IMAP, AOL and Hotmail/MSN, Powerful and flexible, 30 day try before you buyDoes everything, flexibility |
| We don't like | Not much - but it would be better to have ability to backup settings |
| Rating | 9/10 |
| Requirements |
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.
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 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: Mailwasher Pro 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!
Some Facts about Spam and Viruses * Spam won't decrease any time soon, it's a profitable business. |
Despite its simple interface, there's an awful lot happening under the covers as Mailwasher Pro builds up a database to help it makes the right decisions on your behalf.
It has a very powerful filter function that lets you construct your own "sieves" to allow for example, all mails with the word "scuba" or "Fred" to be allowed through, while mails with the word "Free" or "Cialis" can be eliminated. Of course these are just examples and you can fine-tune as you wish.
Mailwasher also checks the content of each email and flags up any containing viruses. Great idea!!!
If there's one area that could be improved, it's that there's currently no easy facility to save your account details and other settings so they can easily be transferred between computers and backed up.
The best feature of all, in my opinion, is that Mailwasher checks the origin of each mail against external databases of spam mailers and immediately selects them for deletion. If you want to fight back against the spammers, you can bounce back unwanted email to the spammer so it looks as if your email address is not valid.
All this works really well together to stop spam, viruses and phishing emails before they even get to your inbox. You can view email from all your email accounts together on the server before it even gets to your computer which is a great timesaver.
To sum up, Mailwasher Pro is a great weapon in the fight against spam! With a 30 day trial you can easily see how well it meets your needs.
Click here for your free 30 day trial copy.
