A friend recommended that I download MAILWASHER. Are you familiar wit

A friend recommended that I download MAILWASHER. Are you familiar with this program & if so, what are your thoughts on it?
-Harriet

This question was answered on November 11, 2002. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.

MailWasher is one of the many new programs that have been developed to fight the scourge of unsolicited commercial e-mail, better known as Spam.

MailWasher is a free stand-alone program (available at mailwasher.net) that will work with any standard POP3 account (AOL and most webmail systems DO NOT use the POP3 standard - the current Beta version has the ability to work with Hotmail accounts) It needs to run before you open your e-mail program so that it can ‘wash’ your mail before your e-mail program tries to download it

It has been rated among the more accurate programs for spotting Spam, but it may be a bit difficult for the novice user, since it requires some technical information to configure and it is separate from your e-mail program If you forget to run it before you check your mail, it does nothing for you.

It does have some interesting features such as the ability to ‘bounce’ a message back to the sender (making it appear your address is invalid), which in some rare cases will actually get you removed from an automated list It also has the ability to create a ‘blacklist’ and ‘friends list’, which allows you to override the system.

If you run Microsoft’s Outlook (not Outlook Express) and want an easier, more automated method of fighting Spam, you should check out a program called SpamNet from Cloudmark.com This free download installs as a plug-in to Outlook and runs automatically when you check your mail.

SpamNet uses the ‘community’ method (much like Napster did) of determining what is Spam by comparing the blocked mail of all of its users and compiling the information on a shared database By automatically checking with this constantly updating database, SpamNet can fight new Spam fairly quickly, without much interaction from the user.

Your only task is to manually click on the ‘Block’ button for any Spam that does get through the filter, which removes it from your Inbox and notifies the central database that you felt that the message was Spam.

If enough users identify the same message as Spam, it automatically becomes part of the filter for all future mail.

If you have Outlook Express, you can wait for SpamNet to finish their upcoming free version for it or you can buy a program called IHateSpam from Sunbelt Software (sunbelt-software.com).

An evaluation version of the program is available at their website (look towards the bottom of the product page) so you can try it out before you spend $30 on it.

If you use the Eudora e-mail program, a company called Spamnix (spamnix.com) has developed a plug-in that works with it They also have a trial version and it has a price tag of $30 as well.

Nothing that has been created thus far is 100% accurate, so don’t expect miracles, but if you get as much Spam as I do (about 300 messages per day) anything that you can do to reduce the number of junk messages is pretty close to miraculous!

Have you tried something that seems to work for you? Let me know so I can share it with others...