MailWasher Pro - part I

Intro

In my last article, called "Spam today: more information", I promised to review some of the programs that help fight spam on home PCs. We have looked at methods of safeguarding your correspondence by achieving a better understanding of spam, following wise email policy, and utilizing the tools offered by many email access providers.

In this present article, I fulfill my promise to offer for your judgment a review of the program that should make emailing pleasurable again, so you can communicate freely on the Internet without being bogged down with spam.

As I wrote previously, programs of this type should be resorted to only if your email service provider's spam filtering instruments are not sufficient.

To be honest, based on the amount of daily spam I get, my junk email experience is not so bad. As a matter of fact, I receive fewer than a dozen spams a day, which makes it difficult for me to thoroughly test an anti-spam program's efficiency.

I am researching ways to simulate the situation of being bombarded with spam. When it comes to testing, more spam to my inbox would better strain each program's filtering abilities to test them to their fullest with a wider choice of options and alternatives.

When I find a better way to test anti-spam apps, I will, of course, revisit this program to scrupulously test its efficiency and will add the results to the aggregate chart that gives the overall statistics of each program's numerical performance. For now, I'll confine myself to describing each program's functionality, ease-of-use and available options.

The focus of today's software review is the program called MailWasher Pro, version 4 (build 1.7.7) from Firetrust Limited. An evaluation copy of the program can be obtained by clicking the "download" button given at the end of Part III of the present review.

Installation and first run

The installation file has a download size of 4.5 megabytes and unpacks to the installation directory taking up only 6 megs on the hard drive, which makes the program the slimmest of those I tested.

Installation went smoothly and included a five-step install wizard.

The program asked me which email accounts I wanted to check for spam and offered me the choice of either manually enter the account properties or to import the settings from the installed email clients.

MailWasher then asked if I'd like it to import my Address Book contacts so that it could make "My friends list". I declined and skipped the remaining install steps.

I then got to the main window of the program, which looks like this:



At a glance, the interface looks solid, precise and comprehensible.

Continue to Part II