 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Washing Your E-Mail Gordon Woolf gordon@worsleypress.com |
Just occasionally a program comes along which fills a need rather than having to create a market. MailWasher is in this category. And until mail program publishers realise that this is what has been missing from their programs, MailWasher can find a place on the computer of anyone who receives more than a few e-mails per day.
What Does MailWasher Do?
It downloads just the headers of e-mails from your ISP, and will do it for multiple mailboxes on multiple providers.
It then presents the list with the option to delete the message while still on the server, and, more importantly, the options to name the sender of the e-mail as a friend or to put the sender on a blacklist, so that mail from those sources will be preselected next time.
It takes only a week or so of use to have most of your "friends" and a substantial number of enemies ("blacklist") marked; the latter needing only a cursory glance. You can choose not to see e-mails from friends and similarly you can choose not to see other legitimate e-mail by setting up filters.
The program will also mark items as likely spam and already have the bounce and delete checkboxes marked, though you can uncheck these. It is possible to set the options in the program to automatically delete all mail considered spam, but it is safer, at least at first, to use the "careful" setting.
Selecting the bounce checkbox means that a fake bounce message will be sent back to the sender, so that it appears that your address does not exist. I have no doubt that before long, mass e-mailers will have worked out a way to identify such messages as fakes, but in the meantime it does seem to reduce spam after a week or so. Not all service providers let such messages through, and others may produce yet another bounce from the other end (as many senders of mass e-mail either fake their sending address or will already have an overloaded return e-mail box by the time your message is bounced).
However, not all unsolicited mail is sent by mass spammers; an increasing number of marketing companies use e-mail to spread their sales pitch and and their unwanted, "exciting" product news. Mailwasher will soon reduce nuisance mail from those sources. You can see what the bounce message looks like by sending a message to yourself and then choosing to bounce it. However, don't forget to remove your address from the blacklist. You can choose which columns appear in the MailWasher window and in what order; In Figure 1, I have added the "attachment" column. |
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MailWasher can be set to launch your e-mail reader, either by using the default settings in Windows or by
entering the command line to the program. As I use Pegasus Mail, with more than one "identity", it was
necessary to include the identity switch so the command line entered in MailWasher read:
C:/Pegasus/winpm-32.exe -I gordon
and you may need a similar setting for some installations of other programs such as Eudora.
However, all the settings MailWasher needs will be either in the preference or options settings dialogs
of your mail program or in the connection details you received on signing up with your ISP.
If you receive more than a few dozen messages a day, you need only an occasional deletion of a spam e-mail
with a multi-megabyte attachment to make using MailWasher not only a safety measure but also a time saver.
If you think a message is doubtful, double clicking on it will download that message which opens in a plain
text window. It may look a mess but this ensures that no virus can get to you and is usually enough for you
to decide if you want to receive the message or not. It starts showing as it is received so there is no need
to receive the full message before taking action.
In a typical session you would mark a few messages to add to your friends list, a few more to blacklist and
a few more still to just delete. Then you Process Mail to carry out those actions and this will then open
your e-mail program ready to download what is left.
I receive several hundred e-mails a day and yet, with this program to get rid of the unwanted messages and
a substantial set of filters in my mail program to put regular messages into specific folders, there are now
generally only half a dozen left in the new mail folder for immediate attention.
Increasingly ISPs are offering spam filters but it often concerns me that opting for some of these could
cause wanted mail to be deleted. There are plenty of classic tales on the Internet of spam filters killing
messages because they have a legitimate use of a word which is set to trigger the filter... one such tale
detailing problems for a northern England seaside resort which has a four letter word hidden in its 10
characters. The advantage of MailWasher is that control stays in the hands of the user.
Another welcome aspect of MailWasher is the ability to bounce messages back to otherwise legitimate sources
that ignore "unsubscribe" messages. They soon take action to unsubscribe you when your
messages come bouncing back every time.
The one remaining question I can hear is "Does it handle mail from Hotmail, AOL and other Web mail hosts?".
The answer is that it will, very shortly. In fact, at the Web site you can live a little more dangerously
and try the beta version of the next release.
MailWasher is written by New Zealander Nick Bolton and is a 1.5MB download from
http://www.MailWasher.net/. It was also distributed on the Melb PC
July Monthly CD.
For an online payment of any amount greater than US$3 you can get rid of the nag screen at the top of the
program, and for a once-off US$20 you can get online support in the unlikely event that is needed.
Reprinted from the August 2002 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
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