MailWasher Pro - part II

Spam removal tools

Of course, the icon labeled "Spam Tools" is the most tempting thing to click on and investigate. Let's see what solutions the authors of the program came up with to save our Inboxes from unrelenting spammers.



The basic tools are the "My friends list" and blacklist. The former lets you create a whitelist, so emails from anyone on "My friends list" are never blocked, while any email from an address on the blacklist is always blocked.

Most modern email clients and mail access providers allow its users to create a whitelist and blacklist to filter email, but this program has more advanced capabilities in the form of domain lists and the use of wildcards (*, ? and +).

"My filters" section resembles the basic filtering instruments of most email clients, but again, this employs more advanced filtering criteria with the option to use Boolean expressions and ready-to-use templates to specify what should be filtered out.

The "Learning" section is not a set of help files. Rather, it lets you teach MailWasher how to recognize spam simply by noting the characteristics of any email you individually designate as spam that happened to get by the existing filters. You can have the program delete, hide or display any spam it detects.

Other MailWasher spam tools are "Virus warnings" and "SpamCop"

Using "Virus warnings", you can opt to have deleted any email containing a virus or with an attachment exhibiting a virus footprint. With "SpamCop", you can directly report instances of spam to spamcop.net. To enable this, you need to register at spamcop.net. According to the program, "SpamCop.net is a reporting service that enables you to take extra action against spammers. This service is suitable for advanced users who want to be proactive in the fight against spam".

The most intriguing "Spam Tools", to me, are the "Origin of spam" and "FirstAlert!". "Origin of spam", lets you block mail sent from both definite and likely spammers. This approach uses the technique referred to as Sender's Identification and Reputation. The sender's reputation is assessed by two large spam-fighting web services, SpamCop (bl.spamcop.net) and ORDB (relays.ordb.org). It's up to you whether to trust these agencies' discretion on the legitimacy of outgoing email based on the DNS of the SMTP server from which email was sent. I have found that "Origin of spam" is an excellent tool and I recommend it.

"FirstAlert!" uses a principle known as Community Response, by which email is individually accessed by a large community of volunteers and network administrators or IT professionals as either legitimate or junk email. If email from a source was mostly flagged as legitimate by members of the community then any new email from the same source is allowed to reach your Inbox. Conversely, if others tagged most email from an address as spam then new email from that person or organization is blocked. This method is accurate, but is limited to messages from very specific addresses, something spammers have learned to avoid.

With MailWasher Pro, if you find a suspected spam message in your Inbox you can submit it to the FirstAlert! database, where the company's IT staff determines whether the reported email is spam or not. If the mail is identified as junk, it is added to the company's spam database, so that all MailWasher Pro users will benefit.

The community response method has the lowest rate of false positives (legitimate email labeled as spam), but the percentage of spam blocked by this approach is also low.

People who are trying out MailWasher Pro (and this includes reviewers like me) don't have a chance to see FirstAlert! at work because the service is fee-based without a free trial period.

This is a wrong decision, in my opinion, because how can users judge the benefits of a service without seeing it work? And, taking into account the number of different anti-spam programs on the market, this feature cannot contribute to a competitive edge.

Continue to Part III
Back to Part I