Many e-mail users find they are plagued with spam problems. In case you're not sure, spam means unsolicited e-mail (often called 'junk mail') that arrives in your inbox persistently without having been requested. Spam is often just advertising material, promoting such things as re-financing your mortgage, travel deals, cheap printer cartridges, or even offering singles a date for Saturday evening! Spam can arrive regularly, even daily, and unfortunately some of it can be quite offensive. It may also contain viruses.
Welcome 'Mailwasher'.
Mailwasher is a freeware program, developed by a New Zealander, designed to remove spam, viruses and unwanted attachments from your e-mail before they get to your computer. It may be downloaded from website www.mailwasher.net It is by no means a huge download (approx.1.5 Mb) and works on most versions of Windows including 95, 98, Me and XP. Once you've installed it, the idea is to open Mailwasher before you open your regular e-mail programmer - Outlook Express, Netscape, etc - it doesn't matter which one you use.
What the Program Does.
Mailwasher connects to your e-mail server, but will only download the mail headings to you. This way you get to see a preview of exactly what is in your mailbox; you see the titles of your e-mails, the dates, and who they are from. Mailwasher then analyses each e-mail by a process of checking and filtering, and warns you if any is suspected as being junk mail or a virus. If you think a message really is for you, double-click on the e-mail and it will download the top part of the message (without images) so you will be able to preview what the message is about. You can then decide if you want to keep it, 'delete' it, or 'bounce' it - you make your choice by simply ticking a box on your screen.
What a Bounce Does.
Once you have identified an e-mail as spam you can choose to blacklist the address it came from. If you put a tick in the box marked 'bounce', Mailwasher will delete the unwanted e-mail from your mailbox and send a message back to the spammer making it appear as if the mail sent to you has bounced because your e-mail address is no longer valid. Thus, hopefully, your name will be removed and you will get no further junk mail from that source.
Deleting.
If you put a tick in the box marked 'delete', Mailwasher will simply delete the mail from your mailbox so that you don't have to download it. This is useful if someone has sent you, say, an e-mail with lots of attached photos you don't really want. It is also ideal for deleting e-mails that are shown to contain viruses, directly off the server so that you don't download them. Once processed - see below - anything marked for deletion is gone for good.
The "Process Mail" Button.
Once you have sorted through your mail and ticked the appropriate boxes, you can click on 'Process Mail' and Mailwasher will proceed to do the bouncing and deleting of the e-mails you don't want. Then when you use your e-mail programmer e.g.. Outlook Express, it will download only the remaining messages - those you actually want to read.
The Blacklist.
Mailwasher keeps a 'blacklist' of offenders for you. Any e-mail you tick for bouncing is recorded in the blacklist so that if any future e-mail arrives from the same address, the 'bounce' box will automatically be ticked. You can of course, manually remove the tick, and you can also manually edit the blacklist if something got on to it by mistake.
Mailwasher usefully tries to analyse the headers of e-mails, so if it thinks an e-mail might be a spam or other unwanted item, it will alert you with a little message in colour.
Note that you can also add into Mailwasher the e-mail addresses of your friends and relatives so that they will always be recognised.
Functionality.
While the freeware programmer is fully functional at all times, the developer does encourage donations. Those prepared to pay just a small sum will receive a registration code that will remove the advertising section from the programmer. His address in Christchurch comes with the programmer under the 'About Me' button.
Only the "Pro" version, which is not freeware, supports Hotmail accounts.
While Mailwasher is easy to install and use, its worth taking a look at the website address mentioned above. The Frequently Asked Questions section is particularly helpful.
The Future for Spam?
The Dominion Post of 2.12.03 reported briefly on Anti-spam moves in Australia, where clogging inboxes with unwanted junk e-mails will soon be a crime. Long awaited anti-spam laws have passed their first hurdle in the Australian federal parliament, though they are thought unlikely to have much of an impact on the bulk of unsolicited commercial e-mails which originate overseas. It will be interesting to see whether any similar moves are started in New Zealand.
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