AntiSpam Guide
Dealing with Spam
from: Frann Leach
Despite the recent laws introduced both in the US and the UK recently, there seems to be no letup in the flood of unwanted email clogging our inboxes. In fact, if anything, the problem seems to be getting worse.
I get around 80 to 100 emails a day to my main address at the moment. It didn't used to be as much as this, and some of the increase is legitimate, but recently anything up to 25% of that is spam. It really is getting unmanageable.
Because they seem to filter out quite a bit of stuff I am waiting for, I have instructed my ISP not to filter my mail at all, so I get the lot, spam and all. At least this means I don't get the problem of missing mail, but now I have to do all the sifting myself, which takes time.
So I decided to devote a little bit of my fast dwindling 'spare' time to looking for a piece of spam-busting software. I wanted something that would
- give me full control
- allow me to vet all my mail
- reduce the hassle involved in setting up individual email filters
- bounce the spam
- remember where it came from and set up a blacklist
- delete the stuff I don't have time to read
AND I wanted it to be easy to use as well.
Quite a tall order, you would think. But I found exactly what I was looking for, at a price that won't break the bank - even MY bank. On top of that, there's a free trial, which does everything I want, so I even got to try it before paying out the measly sum they're asking for it.
I've been using it for over a year now, and my email experience has been completely transformed from what was beginning to be a really unpleasant chore. All I have to do is set it running, and it checks all my various email addresses and compiles a list of what has come in, colour coded so that I can see what's on my whitelist, what's on my blacklist, and what it doesn't recognise.
I just go through the list, marking off the ones I want to keep and the ones to bounce or delete, then tell it to process the mail, and it sends the ones I want to my email client - I use Mozilla Thunderbird, as I find Outlook Express unstable.
Once I have marked an email for bouncing, it remembers that address for next time and marks it as blacklisted - though I can still see it in the list (you can have it delete them automatically, but I prefer not to), so I am safeguarded in case I made a mistake. It also remembers friends and displays them in green, but again, I can change my mind at any time.
I really do like Mailwasher. I've tried controlling spam through the email software, and it's cumbersome and difficult. This software is in a completely different class. I love it.
You don't just have to take my word for it, either. There've been over 5 million downloads of Mai lWasher Free, but you'll be hard put to it to find a bad review.
It's been voted Best Anti-Spam by Australian Personal Computer magazine, has 100% favourable responses by CNet subscribers, and is rated 5 cows by tucows.com.
'Nuff said? Why not try it now. You can download it her e.
About the author:
Frann Leach is webmaster of Best Bytes: Best cheap computers | Custom computers and lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.
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