Stop the Spam with MailWasher
                     www.mailwasher.net

                     An article by Sue

Several people have mentioned to me lately that they're having
increasing problems with Spam in their email inboxes. That's the
reason that I stopped using my MSN email address. Then I
remembered Alex telling me how much MailWasher had helped with his
own excessive Spam problem. He was getting dozens of emails, many
of which were infected with viruses. But by using MailWasher, he
told me, you can do a lot towards eliminating the problem. It
sounded good to me!

What is MailWasher? How does it work and what makes it so much
better than other routines for stopping Spam, like Outlook
Express' own message rules, for instance? Using these you can
divert emails that meet certain criteria such as having a
particular word or words in the message line or body of the
message. Or you can extract ones that come from certain addresses.
All of these messages are put into a folder of your own choosing,
probably one called Junk or Spam.

MailWasher is much, much better. It sits between your email
program and the server. I use Outlook Express so that's what I'll
talk about here. But MailWasher also works with Outlook, Mozilla,
Netscape, Pegasus Mail and Eudora. You run it before running OE -
that's the only thing you have to remember.  Emails coming in are
filtered by the program and only those that you accept are allowed
through. And, this is the good bit. Those that you block are not
only not downloaded from the server, saving time, they are
actually bounced back to the sender with a fake, but
genuine-looking, message that tells them your email address no
longer exists. Hopefully this will take you off their mailing list
and also stop your email address being passed on to other
Spammers.

So, download the program. There are two current versions. The
latest one is a beta and though greatly enhanced from the last
version, still has a few glitches. So I downloaded version 1.33
the last stable version. Install it as usual, following the
prompts.  It's very quick.  Slide the 'shortcut' window out of the
way (I wish software companies wouldn't block their own windows
like that!) and check the box to run the program before pressing
Finish.

The first time you run it, you have to tell it about your email
account(s). You can do this using an Add button, or - much easier
- click the Import button, select the account(s) you want to add,
press Import. You'll see all the details completed for you.  Press
Close to get rid of the Accounts window. Log onto the Internet.

Press the Check Mail button and fill in your password, checking
the Remember My Password box if you don't want to have to type it
in every time. Any emails waiting on your server will be listed
with the address they've come from, with their subject, date and
account.

Now for the extras! MailWasher will try to identify Spam and
emails containing viruses, using its built-in criteria, and will
mark these for bouncing and/or deletion. You can override these
settings if you wish. The first two columns contain check boxes.
Click on these to add a tick if you want to bounce back and/or
delete any mails, then click on Process Mail. Any emails marked
for bouncing will have their email addresses added to your
blacklist as the emails are returned to their sender with the
appropriate 'address no longer exists' message. You can also have
a Friends list which means MailWasher automatically passes their
mail. To save time you can import your address book into
MailWasher so all your current contacts are listed as friends.

Remember you'll also have to switch off automatic email checking
in Outlook Express otherwise it will kick in before MailWasher.
This is obvious but completely escaped me and I couldn't work out
why new mails were arriving in OE as well as being displayed in
MailWasher!

Because the program searches for Spam using certain criteria (eg
emails sent to undisclosed recipients) you can make use of this
facility and set up your own criteria. For example, you can
identify all emails with 'dear friend' in the body text or all
emails with DOC attachments, then select how you want to deal with
them. There's a useful list of filters you can download from
MailWasher's site. These have been set up by users. You can also 
import other people's blacklists and incorporate them into your
own checks.

So, there you have it. Does MailWasher do what it says? Yes, it
does. Is it easy to use? Again, yes. I hope the day never comes
but if I started getting a lot of Spam at my current email
address, I'd certainly use it on a regular basis.








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