MailWasher Pro

Fighting spam has become almost a full time exercise and according to the experts there is more spam traveling the Internet than legitimate electronic mail. Apart from being just a nuisance spam can also be criminally dangerous, as well as costing us money by using up our Internet resources. Over the years I've tried all sorts of spam filters - some were very good while others were a complete waste of time. The one thing they all had in common was that the messages in our ISP's mail box had to be downloaded before these spam filters could sort the spam from the legitimate e-mails.

I then discovered a spam filter that was different and better than the others called Mailwasher Pro by Firetrust. One of the big advantages of Mailwasher Pro is that the program looks at and displays your e-mails while they are still on your ISP's server. So, before downloading anything, you can see what's heading your way and eliminate it before it's even had a chance to reach you. This makes for faster downloads of legitimate e-mails and reduces costs and risks.

Mailwasher Pro is easy to install and my only beef is with the automatic installation Wizard which I've never found of any use. I've always done the setup manually and avoided the hassles.

When viewing your e-mails on the Mailwasher Pro display, many of the risky ones will already have been identified, queried or blacklisted by Mailwasher Pro from its inbuilt encyclopaedia of dangerous e-mail sources. There is also a "learning" filter which observes your likes and dislikes and records them so that it can eventually do a lot of the vetting for you. Mailwasher Pro can be set to load when you boot your computer and to place an icon in your task bar so that when new e-mails arrive the icon blinks to let you know.

This feature-loaded spam filter enables you to delete e-mails, blacklist e-mails, record them as coming from friends, and even bounce e-mails back to the sender. Any e-mails accidentally deleted can be easily retrieved from the recycle bin and automatically sent to your e-mail program.

Mailwasher Pro costs around $40 US and for this you get free upgrades for life, world-best support, updated spam lists and great security. That's not to say that the program is invincible. For example, once you have viewed and vetted your e-mails while they are still at your ISP's site, and your mouse pointer is hovering over the "process mail" button, it's a good idea to tell the program to check the ISP's site again just in case some spam has come in while you were doing your check. Even so, it's amazing just how quickly spam can move. Between clicking the "process mail" button and the e-mail arriving at your computer spam can come in and evade all the checking. But that doesn't often happen.

Mailwasher Pro will operate with any operating system and all e-mail programs, so even Thunderbird users are catered for. Once you have clicked the "process mail" button, Mailwasher automatically opens your e-mail program and all you have to do is click your program's "mail" button and the e-mails are downloaded, spam free.

There is a free version of Mailwasher which is very good too. It's a scaled down version of PRO and is prone to giving error messages as you go in to check your e-mails. But if you simply ignore these messages you will find that everything will be working fine on most occasions. One major difference between Mailwasher Free and PRO is that PRO allows you to have numerous domains whereas the free version limits you to just one. This won't be much of a disadvantage for most users.

The new version is due for release anytime now and from what I've read, numerous improvements have been made to it as a result of Firetrust listening to its customers.

For further information contact Email Security, Anti-spam, MailWasher Pro Spam Blocker, Anti Virus, Anti Spyware Software, MailWasher creators | Firetrust Ltd