Use A Spam Filtering Tool To Manage Spam And Save Hours Everyday
For most of us, changing our primary email address to get rid of
spam is not really an option. This is because our email
addresses are known and used by many of our contacts and may
also be printed on business cards and other material. We
certainly don't move to a different residence because of some
junk mail in our letter boxes. Luckily, there are some very
effective ways to combat spam and one such was is using a Spam
filtering tool.
The particular tool that I am referring to is called MailWasher.
It is a tool that I cannot do without. I've been using it for
about 2 years now and my running totals shows that 72% of emails
received are automatically deleted by Mailwasher. For more
product information on Mailwasher, please visit:
www.BSDRegister.com/products/mailwasher
Mailwasher is a piece of software that works at the source i.e.
it connects directly to your inbox on the server and takes care
of emails there. This is very different to using email filters
in your email software for example Outlook or Thunderbird. The
major difference is that Mailwasher wipes out emails on the
email server so that you never have to download them. Having a
filter in Outlook would mean that the email has to first be
downloaded onto your computer and then examined and dealt with
accordingly. For those messages spreading viruses, this could
well pose a threat.
Mailwasher is easy to setup and takes a few minutes. There is a
30-day free trial of the software so that you can have ample
time to decide if it is working for you. Initially, I started
setting up my own spam filters and was having some success, but
then I stumbled upon a link on the company's website that
pointed to a link where an avid user was offering his filters
for free. I downloaded those and installed them and have never
look back. The amount of spam that was identified started to
steadily increase until the 72% level that it is at today. This
means that on average, 3 of every 10 eamils I receive are
legitimate and are allowed through by Mailwasher. The rest are
deleted at the source and I don't have to spend time downloading
them. This is a big deal if you are using dialup access to the
Internet.
There are many controls within the software. You can specify
emails be deleted automatically without your knowledge or you
could have the program mark them for deletion but let you glance
at them just in case. This is useful initially until you get a
good feel for it. There are many other options that fall in
between these. The good thing is that they are all on one screen.
There is a concept of a blacklist and a whitelist. You can
import all of your address book from Outlook with a couple of
clicks and from other email programs as well. These go into what
is called a whitelist. Mailwasher will allow all emails through
that are on the whitelist. It will mark or automatically delete
all those that are on the blacklist. Adding or removing someone
from either list is a very simple point and click exercise.
Mailwasher also allows the setting up of legitimate filters.
These are methods of specifying an email as legitimate. For
example, if you identify all emails coming from your company
domain name as being legitimate, then all messages from your
coworkers will be allowed through without you having to specify
each person. This is achieved using a wildcard setting such as
"*@youworkdomain.com". This can also be used to blacklist an
entire domain such that all messages are immediately marked for
deletion or automatically deleted depending on your settings.
MailWasher is an independent program and does not interfere with
your email software. It sits in the system tray and does its
work diligently. In my case, it checks my inbox every 10 minutes
and does a cleanout. I have my email software setup to only
retrieve messages when I instruct it to so that MailWasher has
the most opportunity to do it's work.
Mailwasher also has more advanced controls, one of them being
something known as "Origin of Spam". There are servers on the
internet which list known spam addresses. When you receive a
message from one of these addresses, it is automatically marked
as spam and deleted without your filters even being invoked.
This is a remarkable system and comes free with MailWasher. A
whopping 14% of emails that I get are identified in this manner
and automatically deleted.
MailWasher is an indispensable tool in my email arsenal. If spam
is a problem for you, it could do likewise for you. Download
your free trial today and use it for 30 days. If you like it,
you only pay $37 which in my book is a small price to pay for so
much time saved everyday.