Topic: Spams & Scams

Too much spam in your inbox?

This is mainly for those using an email program (as opposed to the webmail interfaces like Yahoo, Hotmail, MSN, etc.), programs to install on your computer which check your email, let you mark, block and delete spam before you download it in your email program, Outlook Express, Eudora, etc.

SpamNet from Cloudmark, integrates into Outlook, Outlook Express, Lotus Notes, MSN, Hotmail and more.

Mailwasher lets you view your mail safely, without fear of triggering viruses or alerting the spammer that you open spam mail. You can select various spam blocklists to filter on, delete spam, etc. Note: This program has a feature to do a fake bounce of the spam, give a message of "user unknown", the idea was to fake out the spammer and make him think your address is invalid so he'll stop spamming you, but these days, 99.9999% of all spam has a fake email address that has no relation to the spammer so if you use the bounce feature, you're simply spamming an innocent third party so I highly advise not using that bounce feature.

iHateSpam integrates with Outlook Express, Outlook, Eudora and more, filtering spam to a quarantine folder. It's $20 with a 30 day free trial. Note: This program has the "bounce" feature like Mailwasher and for the same reasons I gave above, I urge people not to use that feature, otherwise, it looks like a decent program worth checking out. Marina posted these comments about IHateSpam on EL-M about why she preferred it over MailWasher:

"MailWasher can't be integrated with OE (Outlook Express). To get it to work, one first needs to check MailWasher, then go back to OE and download email, having checked it in MailWasher first. If one gets hundreds of emails a day, going to MailWasher first can take a bit of scrolling for the likes of me who has most mail filtered into folders in OE. Going the MailWasher route is more tedious and time-consuming for me to do than just downloading email straight into OE first, especially as I check my email a lot during a day. Also, one can't normally bounce emails straight from within OE, whereas with iHateSpam one can. Sometimes, it's not only "commercial" spam one may want to bounce, but other forms of unwanted email.

"iHateSpam puts a small toolbar above the OE toolbar, with all the same functions as MailWasher (a friend's list, an enemy list, a bounce button, etc and the facility to include whole domains in the enemy list). It also has its own filters - one can set it to just put future spam in one's deleted items, or to highlight it red in inbox, or to not download from server or to delete from server. It comes with its own set of definitions, "known patterns found in unsolicited emails" which are updatable."

SpamPal is similar to iHateSpam but it's totally free, no cost at all. It too integrates with Outlook Express, Outlook, Eudora and quite a few others, it tags any email it classes as spam and then you set up a filter in your mail program to sort it all to a separate folder for your review. Paul Croft posted this on ListHelp:

"WOW! Now this is a great program! FREEWARE and it works! Fully configurable...whoooooo hooooo! Has every spam blocking site that I have ever heard of listed...but you can turn them on and off if you don't like them! I had problems d/l the full version...but was able to get the version without manual to work!

"It did list my Topica mailing as spam...but you can allow mail to filter through even if it marks it as spam. It doesn't delete anything...it simply marks it as spam and then you set up a filter to take it to trash or a holding folder where you can manually check it out!

"Works great with Eudora...and they claim it works with any POP mail program!"

McAfee's SpamKiller costs money but you can download a 30 day evaluation trial Mark Recktenwald posted a review of it on the EL-M list:

"It works similar to MailWasher (allows you to check your POP3 mail account for spam) but does some things a bit differently and appears to be a bit more customizable. It groups mail into 4 categories: New mail, New possible spam, Killed spam and Mail from a friend. Killed spam is automatically removed from your POP3 server (but saved in the SpamKiller application). The others remain for you to read with your e-mail client.

"One big advantage over MailWasher is that SpamKiller has an interface that lets you perform some simple network queries on the killed mail, search for abuse addresses for the domains it finds in the killed mail headers, and send complaints to the appropriate addresses (no more waiting for SpamCop to process it for you).

"The supplied list of filters is extensive (known spammers, known spam domains, typical text within spam messages, etc.) and completely customizable. The action taken on the mail can be adjusted for each filter. Mail from folks on your friends list is not killed even if it matches a filter that would otherwise kill the mail. The day I downloaded it, I spent about three hours going through the various screens and tweaking it to my liking. It works fine right out of the box, but it can look overwhelming to one who is still a novice computer user. Although I have only been using it about a week, the only non-spam messages that it has killed so far have been automatic replies from abuse departments that referenced the original spam subject where words in that subject were the cause of the original kill (the usual George Carlin words and then some)."

There are more spam filtering programs out there, check Google for more options. Thanks to Marina, Paul and Mark Recktenwald for their comments.

Last updated on December 26, 2003 04:02 PM
Comments
Post a comment