Review of Mailwasher Pro Anti Spam Software

I'm going to go slightly off-topic here, guys, because I'm sure this is something you've all had a little grumble about before. You know how much spam you have to deal with when you don't check your email for a few days? Well, my dear trusty laptop has been an expensive paperweight for two weeks now, and I've just got it back from the dear trusty laptop fixit place this morning. Yes, there were hugs, tears of relief, promises of future conscientious caretaking... but most of all there was spam.

4892 of the ugly buggers.

Admittedly I could have been checking and deleting these off the server while my laptop was out of service, and thereby avoided the current glut, but meh. I'd rather watch paint dry. Or grass grow. Or stare at my screen waiting for my pagerank to go up.

Anyway, now I've got my laptop back I can get MailWasher Pro on the job. I've known the MailWasher guys for ages, and I know they make mighty fine software very capable of such a mammoth spam filtering as this.

I fired it up, it took about 10 minutes to scan all the mail and do a rough analysis of what appeared to be spam, and then it took about another 15 minutes to process the messages because I had to add a few new rules to MailWasher's "brain". (In this case it was the creative misspelling "Russian Tee-ens"!) Normally I just fire it up, MailWasher will analyze the emails automatically and then I hit "process mail" and it's all gone.

With the giant job today MailWasher still didn't get EVERYTHING. There were a few spam emails that I had to manually flag, but that's ok by me. At least I didn't have to download them to my computer since it's all done on the server. No risk of spam-introduced nasties infecting my recently recovered baby!

One really great thing about MailWasher Pro is that it uses directories of known spam sources to immediately flag nasty looking messages. And for spam messages that aren't on the blacklists, you can teach MailWasher about those too. There's a little "learning" function that makes MailWasher take note of what you mark as "good mail" or spam, so that when similar mail comes in future it knows how to deal with it.

I particularly like blacklisting. Maybe that says something about me. I click on an email, hit the minus/hyphen (-) key, and laugh a little laugh knowing that I'll never get mail from that address again. And bouncing. You can bounce the email back to the spammer so it looks as if your email address doesn't exist. You can also fight back by reporting spam, which sends an alert to the MailWasher oompa loompas who check it and add it to a global directory so that other people don't have to deal with it. All they need now is a virtual spam punching bag and you'll have all the revenge-taking you can handle!

Anyway, enough of the sales pitch. If your current spam software isn't much chop, or if you're just really easily influenced ( :) ) you can go grab a free 30 day trial from Firetrust . If you like it, you can thank me later :)

Right. Now that I don't have to deal with any more spam I'm going to go stare at my screen and wait for my pagerank to increase.

Take care guys,
Mark

P.S My next blog post is going to be a really interesting one on how to uncover profitible keywords and markets, don't miss it!