Dealing with Spam

Dealing with Spam
by Frann Leach
May 20, 2005


Despite the recent laws introduced both in the US and the UK recently, there seems to be no letup in the flood of unwanted email clogging our inboxes. In fact, if anything, the problem seems to be getting worse.


I get around 60 to 80 emails a day to my main address at the moment. It didn't used to be as much as this, and some of the increase is legitimate, but recently anything up to 25% of that is spam. It really is getting unmanageable.


Because they seem to filter out quite a bit of stuff I am waiting for, I have instructed my ISP not to filter my mail at all, so I get the lot, spam and all. At least this means I don't get the problem of missing mail, but now I have to do all the sifting myself, which takes time.


So I decided to devote a little bit of my fast dwindling 'spare' time to looking for a piece of spam-busting software. I wanted something that would




give me full control

allow me to vet all my mail

reduce the hassle involved in setting up individual email filters

bounce the spam

remember where it came from and set up a blacklist

delete the stuff I don't have time to read



AND I wanted it to be easy to use as well.


Quite a tall order, you would think. But I found exactly what I was looking for, at a price that won't break the bank - even MY bank. On top of that, there's a free trial, which does everything I want, so I even got to try it before paying out the measly sum they're asking for it.


I've been using it for a couple of weeks now, and my email experience has been completely transformed from what was beginning to be a really unpleasant chore. All I have to do is set it running, and it checks all my various email addresses and compiles a list of what has come in, colour coded so that I can see what's on my whitelist, what's on my blacklist, and what it doesn't recognize.


I just go through the list, marking off the ones I want to keep and the ones to bounce or delete, then tell it to process the mail, and it sends the ones I want to my email client - I use Mozilla Thunderbird, as I find Outlook Express unstable.


Once I have marked an email for bouncing, it remembers that address for next time and marks it as blacklisted - though I can still see it in the list, so I am safeguarded in case I made a mistake. It also remembers friends and displays them in green, but again, I can change my mind at any time.


I really do like Mailwasher. I've tried controlling spam through the email software, and it's cumbersome and difficult. This software is in a completely different class. I love it.


You don't just have to take my word for it, either. There've been over 5 million downloads of MailWasher Free, but you'll be hard put to it to find a bad review.


It's been voted Best Anti-Spam by Australian Personal Computer magazine, has 100% favourable responses by CNet subscribers, and is rated 5 cows by tucows.com.


'Nuff said? Why not try it now. You can download it here.

About the Author
Frann Leach
http://www.informationzone.biz/

Frann lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. She has her own internet marketing business and is always on the lookout to recruit go-getters like herself.
Find out more: here