Say ‘Goodbye’ to Spam Email for good! (MailWasher)

Member Name: Flibble

Product:	MailWasher
Date:	08/05/02 (564 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Free to download, Easy to setup and use, Stop that spam

Disadvantages: None so far

I don’t know about you, but I seem to be getting more and more inundated with junk Email – or spam on a regular basis and it really starts to get on my nerves. Now, at the bottom of these emails you will often see a little bit of text that says:

‘If you would like to unsubscribe from this mailing list, please click here’

And so I did – but that was my fatal mistake. Whilst I had removed myself from one mailing list, I had signalled to the sender that my Email address was an active one that was being used by me. Once they get an instruction to remove someone from a mailing list, more often than not they will then sell your Email address details on to other junk Email companies. The result of which is even more spam being sent to you!

So, what can you do to try and eliminate this thing from happening? What you need is an Email filtering program, and I’ve found a brilliant one! Its’ a little piece of software wrote by Nick Bolton called ‘Mail Washer’. Mail Washer works between your Email mail server (the place your computer goes to collect your Email from) and your home computer.

What it does is it goes off and checks the Email, then previews it to you in a window, telling you what the Email is called, who it’s from and if it may be Spam Email. You can then preview the whole message if you’re still unsure if you want to retrieve it from the mail server properly.

Now, I realise this doesn’t sound overly exciting. But it does give you some handy options. The biggest is the ‘bounce back’ option. This makes your Email server send the Email back to the person who sent it to you – so that they get a message saying ‘This Email address does not exist’ and hopefully they’ll stop sending you junk Email you’re not interested in. If you want to read the Email, you can then send it to your normal Email program a
nd look at it as you would do normally.

Getting hold of Mail Washer is very easy to do – just visit the website www.mailwasher.net and you can download your free copy. It doesn’t cost anything to get, you aren’t restricted by a time period you can use it in (like a one month demo) and it’s very simple to get working.

Once it’s downloaded, you just click on the install icon and that’s about it. You need to tell Mail Washer which Email accounts you want to use it with – but this is easy to do once again as it scans your Email program (such as Outlook Express) and detects all the Email accounts on there, it then sets up Mail Washer to examine any Email sent to these addresses for you.

Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to scan for spam! Open the program, click ‘check mail’ and off it goes – from here you can use the clear menu’s and navigation buttons to filter your Email as you want, it really couldn’t be easier. I’ve used this for about a week now and it really has cut down the amount of unsolicited Email I receive.

If like me, you are getting fed up of hitting ‘delete’ on spam Email, then you could do a lot worse than get this little utility – highly recommended.

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