MailWasher
Pro v3.1
Reviewed
by: Howard
Carson, send
e-mail
Published
by: Firetrust
Limited, go
to the web site
Requires: Windows
95 or higher, Pentium computer or faster, 4 MB of RAM,
4MB of disk space, and an Internet connection
MSRP: $29.95
If
you haven't yet been digitally accosted by spam e-mail
deluging your InBox then you're the luckiest computer
user alive. The fact is that spam is a scourge and
it's definitely out of hand. The spammer who called
in to a June 2003 episode of The Screen Savers inadvertently
described his true mein when he truculently attempted
to debase hosts Patrick Norton and Leo LaPorte by loudly
comparing their personal incomes to his own - at least
the income he claimed to earn from his allegedly full-time
spamming occupation. The discussion ended on that vacuous
note, with Norton and LaPorte left speechless by the
asinine arrogance of the spammer. |
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The young
spammer doesn't realize that the rich people in this world
(by that we mean the truly rich - in both spirit and cash)
are the ones who can support their interests, vocations
and families by means of something other than endeavors
which are unremittingly burdensome to their peers. Spam,
you see, is not competitive by nature - its sheer volume
negates any professed option to make comparative choices.
Spam is fundamentally boorish - fire off millions of spam
e-mails every week and someone, somewhere is bound to bite;
marketing by the incompetent. Spam is so fulsomly deceptive
by nature that the ability for any of us to determine its
potential legitimacy is often deliberately obscured - a
legal con about which the progenitors laugh, ridiculing
the burden we bear for sorting its hundreds of millions
of instances: "If you don't like it," they cry, "hit
the delete key!" as though we could somehow read past
the calculatingly devious subject lines in every case to
enable ourselves to decide what's what; another red-herring
tossed at us by the conscienceless miscreants. In the end,
we're left to barricade our digital borders with all manner
of protections - even those among us who have been duped
into placing orders for products which never arrive, subscribing
to magazines which never appear, or illegally attempting
to engage the services of some pathetically thieving Nigerian
malefactors (or Congolese, Liberian - take your pick) bent
on lying and stealing their way into some sort of twisted
bounty.
To top it all off, the crabby mandarins charged with protecting
the public from its own misfortunes - the consumer protection
crowd, government agencies, and all the rest - sort of
stare off into space when confronted with the subject of
spam, pointing to ineffectual legislation designed along
aging lines of control. How on earth do you charge and
prosecute an off-shore server? Or an out-of-state/province
offender? Who will pay for such efforts? The credit card
companies issue accounts to the spam stooges for pete's
sake and legitimize them to some extent thereby! They are
here today, gone tomorrow, with just enough ill-gotten
cash to entice other charlatans into engaging the same
schemes.
MailWasher Pro is the first line of defense all of us
should consider using against spam e-mail. It works by
installing a program that looks like your typical e-mail
software, but which is actually nothing more than a utility
which logs on to all your e-mail accounts, reads but does
not download your e-mail, allowing you to delete, blacklist,
friendlist and/or bounce (return to sender) each and every
mail prior to launching your regular e-mail software and
downloading whatever you've kept. The software also features
a very versatile filtering dialog which allows you to set
up all manner of additional filtering besides the built-in
blacklist file which is supplied with MailWasher. Every
conceivable filtering combination is available (and is
vastly superior to the absurdly rudimentary spam filtering
available in Outlook), with wildcards, various To/From,
domain, and customization controls and settings.
To use MailWasher, you first must turn off automatic mail
checking in your usual e-mail program. That's because MailWasher
is the first thing you launch when checking your e-mail.
Once you've checked off each e-mail shown in MailWasher,
click the mail processing button. MailWasher will process
everything while its still on the various mail servers,
then it launches your usual e-mail program for you so you
can download only the good e-mail left over. It's a simple
system that works well. The software installed and ran
flawlessly.
If you're looking for an inexpensive, well-designed, useful
antispam tool, take a long look at MailWasher and MailWasher
Pro.
Cons: We had to occasionally close then restart Outlook
in order to download the mail processed by MailWasher and
send any mail in the Outbox. We could not find any FAQ
about the problem on the FireTrust web site or Microsoft's
Knowledge Base. We'd like to have a Select All/Deselect
All function for each of the Blacklist and the Bounce mail
processing columns.
Pros: Flawless
operation with Eudora v5.2, Pegasus v4, Outlook Express
5 & 6 and The Bat. Decent operation
with Outlook 2000 and 2002 (see Cons, above). Mailwasher
Pro is a great spam solution which is easy to control,
easy to configure and extemely useful above all else. Highly
recommended.
Letters to the Editor are welcome and occasionally abused in public. Send e-mail to: whine@kickstartnews.com
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