MAILWASHER PRO 4.0
http://www.firetrust.com

What’s it do?

MailWasher Pro features built-in intelligent features to help users identify good email from spam. It provides a global network that allows users to report spam. It works outside the email client so that users are better protected and avoid the risk of downloading unwanted messages or viruses and worms. Users can preview, delete, blacklist, and create an “invalid email address” message and bounce the unwanted email back to the spammer, purportedly making it appear that their email address no longer exists.


Does it do what it promises?

Reviewer 1. Yes. I will below, however, take issue with some of the exaggerations if not hyperboles found on their web site (www.firetrust.com) regarding MailWasher Pro.

Reviewer 2. Usually..

Reviewer 3. Yes.

Reviewer 4. Yes, the program does exactly what it promises to do.

Reviewer 5. Yes, and in spades. You run MailWasher when you want to check your email, it logs into your account, and then displays a list of email messages waiting for you. It does this very quickly, much faster than your email program itself. Below the headers list is a preview pane in which you see the contents of any of the messages in the list. What is really great is that you are reading all of this directly from your mail server, and have not yet downloaded anything to your own computer. Using the various options provided by MailWasher, you sort out which messages you want to receive, and what you want to do the rest: delete them, “bounce” them or “report” them. MailWasher will then process them and call up your email client. From then on, you run whatever email program you normally use to send and receive messages. All that you have specified as spam, or messages that you do not want to read, will have already been deleted from your mail server, so they will not reach your own computer.


Was it easy to install?

Reviewer 1. Yes. It could, however, have been a bit easier to install. You must manually input your email server and user name during setup, and a separate help file would have been a nice addition. Otherwise, it is a relatively small installation (2.8mb) and double clicking the application file itself started the installation that proceeded without any problems. Once installed it placed only one item in the Programs menu which is nice, but it does by default place a shortcut icon on my desktop which some of you may have by now come to know, is a big pet peeve of mine. Ask first, please! Another positive note is that you are not tricked into installing spyware during the set up process—something which is becoming all too common these days.

Reviewer 2. The actual installation of the software was automatic. The setup and configuration process was horrific. MailWasher offered to import my email accounts. That was quite a relief for a person who has nine accounts set up in Outlook Express 6 on Windows XP Pro until it said “No accounts could be located for importing”. MailWasher began accessing email accounts while I was still preparing to Import Address Books, and I still hadn’t found all my email passwords. I wouldn’t even have known it was doing this, if it hadn’t popped up a logon interface for an account for which I hadn’t entered the password.

MailWasher responded: It’s not expected that MailWasher would find the accounts for importing. Will try to do some more testing here to see if we can reproduce, though my initial testing with OE6 and XP Pro shows that MailWasher correctly saw all accounts.

Since this occurred while I was still trying to configure MailWasher and I still didn’t know how to use the program, I thought it was deleting legitimate email from my contacts because I hadn’t told it yet who they were. I would learn later that this wasn’t happening; but for the moment, I was panicking. A “session encountered errors” interface appeared. I clicked an Options button hoping to disable MailWasher until I could finish configuring it. All I found were options for the error log. MailWasher wanted me to turn off automatic checking in the email program so that it could check first. I wasn’t ready to let MailWasher check first! Besides, it was doing so already.

MailWasher responded: By default, MailWasher will start checking the accounts every 10 minutes. We presume that users would have their accounts initially set up within this time, which obviously is not going to be the case every time. Presuming the import worked, I doubt this would have been a problem, so solving the above makes this redundant.

I wanted to import Outlook Express’ Blocked Sender List. I couldn’t find that option. I opened MailWasher Help to try to find how. Instead, Help told me how to import my accounts, which it already failed to do. Help doesn’t tell me whether I can import my Blocked Sender List.

MailWasher responded: This cannot be done. OE stores this information in the DBX format which, unfortunately, MailWasher cannot read.

I cannot toggle between Help and MailWasher to double-check instructions while following them.

MailWasher responded: This has been remedied for future releases. It’s a simple compiler option.

Upon closing Help, I discovered that MailWasher had frozen. Nothing on the interface reacted to my mouse for so long that I was about to use Task Manager to kill it. Okay, it was busy checking mail. I wasn’t ready for it do that, but I hadn’t found how to stop it.

MailWasher responded: As above.

I went to the MailWasher Support Forum to try to find how to import Outlook Express’ Blocked Sender List. I scanned the first five pages of thread topics, but found nothing on this topic. The forum doesn’t seem to have a search function to help me find my topic.

MailWasher responded: The forum has a search feature which the reviewer must have just missed. The search is near the top of the screen below the navigation bar.

I registered with the forum to post the topic. The forum was supposed to send me a password in the email. I didn’t receive it. Was this because the forum administrator isn’t in my Friends list?

MailWasher responded: I’m not aware of any current issues with www.computercops.biz , though in June 2004 ComputerCops did move hosts, and as a result their automated email scripts were unfortunately down.

I wanted to disable MailWasher so I could receive the password to get into the MailWasher Support Forum. MailWasher Help wanted to tell me how to disable my email application instead.

MailWasher responded: That’s a simple misunderstanding on how MailWasher works.

If I needed to learn that, I would have gone to the email application’s Help. I finally received the password, and posted my question. How I wished I could stop MailWasher from checking mail while I was configuring it. It seemed like it deleted the notification that someone replied to my forum question. I was going to see if I could create a filter for those notifications, but now the deleted notification no longer appeared in MailWasher. I looked for it in my email application’s Deleted folders. It wasn’t there. It seemed that the message was deleted permanently. I had no idea how many messages I’d lost already. I finally found the message in my email application’s Inbox. So maybe MailWasher wasn’t deleting email after all; I had no idea what was going on! Replies to my question about importing Blocked Senders indicated that this would be an exercise in copying and pasting.

MailWasher responded: Correct, as above. OE stores this information in the DBX format which MailWasher cannot read.

I finally found another set of Options, and deselected default mail check so I could continue configuring MailWasher. I also had problems with the Edit Filter interface. If I hadn’t typed a rule, it wouldn’t let me save my work. I could drag it out of the way to see the main MailWasher interface, but I couldn’t get it to mouse-over or drag fields wider to check spelling. It sure would have been handy to be able to click a button to copy a filter. Instead, I needed to type from scratch to create two filters that are almost identical but react differently to the messages. You know, I wouldn’t even need to type rules if MailWasher would let me create filters from messages! It is easy to create my Rules and Blocked Sender list in OE and I wish MailWasher would import my OE Blocked Sender list! If MailWasher would let me create filters from messages, I wouldn’t even miss importing OE Blocked Senders. I hadn’t tried right-clicking on messages in MailWasher’s Preview Pane in earlier sessions because nothing happened when I tried it right after I installed the program. Now, I right-clicked a message and discovered that I can indeed create blacklist and Friends list entries from messages. My best guess is that when I tried right-clicking before, either MailWasher was frozen, or Help or Edit Filter was open.

MailWasher responded: This review has highlighted some improvements that can be made in regards to filter creation.


Reviewer 3. Yes.

Reviewer 4. Yes, I had no problems installing MailWasher Pro.

Reviewer 5. Yes. No problems at all. And although I did not need to call on the support people this particular time, I have always found them to be quick in responding, and ready to help you with personal, friendly service.


Good Points

Reviewer 1. Unlike the majority of mail filters or “spam killers,” MailWasher Pro does work with almost any POP3, IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol), AOL (a real rarity), or Hotmail/MSN accounts. This may, however, be its lone real advantage. There are some small but appreciable points worth mentioning: It does profit from the real-time First Alert ! database of known junk (free with your initial download but an additional $10.00 a year subscription from then on), you can create your own message filters, you can blacklist and whitelist entire domains, and if you feel like blowing off a little steam (though it won’t actually help), you can bounce messages back to from where they came.

Reviewer 2. MailWasher allows the user to review incoming mail without placing it into the mail application, without displaying sleazy graphics, and without downloading the entire message. Remembering times when it would take so long to download one message with obnoxiously huge attachments that my connection would time out, I wish I’d had this functionality when I was on dial-up! MailWasher flags email viruses. Even if they are so new that they pass my ISP’s filters to get here and my Antivirus program doesn’t recognize them if I download them, MailWasher somehow recognizes them and flags them for deletion.  Within a week after I’d started marking messages for learning, MailWasher was successfully recognizing about half of the incoming spam. It’s quite a bit slower learning to recognize foreign-language spam, but I think it’s getting there. When one of Microsoft’s Critical Updates left all the Microsoft applications on my PC in Critical Condition, MailWasher allowed me to continue to view my email. I discovered that when I tell Outlook Express to Send/Receive, It included my Hotmail account as well as my POP accounts. It never did this before. I had to Synchronize All from the Tools menu to receive Hotmail. I can only guess that MailWasher made this change.

MailWasher responded: MailWasher does not alter any settings in Outlook Express.

Reviewer 3. Not only did the package do what it promised, it did it very well. Once it was setup it went off and just worked. The interface is very easy to understand and get around in. It also kept me informed as to what it was doing through the status bar. I found it very intuitive to work with. Flagging mail as from friends or as spam was a simple right click. The Quick Reply button was also a nice touch. I was able to track down some problematic email by viewing the source of the message, something difficult to find in Outlook. The Help was easy to understand and had plenty of screen shots. It was nice to have the Friend and Blacklist available without having to hunt through dialog boxes. The Filter capability allowed me to fine tune the application so only the mail I wanted was delivered.

Reviewer 4.  It is a very easy program to master and use. It is as good as or better than any other mail filtering software I’ve used. It is easy to blacklist spammers and create friendly lists to allow known addresses through. It has excellent filtering and learning behavior.

Reviewer 5. The first thing is that you manage all the spam and virus-infected email messages on the mail server of your ISP. You do not receive anything that you have not chosen to get. This is different from all the other anti-spam software that I have seen so far, in which you download all the messages that have arrived in your email “box” and filters are applied once it has arrived on your own computer. This is not to say that other systems are not effective, but in all these cases, worms and viruses can get through onto your computer. They may be classified and sorted out in one way or another, but they are actually there on your machine, ready to do their damage. MailWasher also allows you to take a proactive approach to spam, rather than simply reacting to all the stuff that arrives in your mailbox. In addition to deleting unwanted messages, you can also mark them for bouncing and/or for reporting. “Bounce” bounces the message out of your box, back to its point of origin, suggesting to the sender that this particular email box does not exist. Personally, I have stopped doing this, partly because the spammers normally do not send out the spam from their own address, but from drones that may not even be aware that they are being used. This may put an excessive strain on the drone. Secondly, I found that I often got a reply saying that the sender’s address (the one that had been bounced to) did not exist, so I got a double whammy from those spammers. “Report” is more useful, because the message goes to “FirstAlert”, a subscription service ($US 7.00 per year) run by the MailWasher people. Your message gets analyzed, and if it is really spam, it gets added to the FirstAlert database. From then on, all people using MailWasher Pro have their messages automatically checked against the FirstAlert database. Any MailWasher Pro user who receives that particular spam message will find it already defined as “Known Spam”, and already marked to be deleted. This version of MailWasher has added a “Learning” function. Instead of looking only at the headers (“To: From: Subject: etc.), it also scans the message, looking for words that suggest legitimate mail or spam. As you mark messages as “good” or “bad”, it collects statistics on the words in those messages. Although I do not fully understand the math, it uses “Bayesian statistics” to track the good and bad mail. This method is now being used in other anti-spam software, and greatly enhances MailWasher’s filtering abilities. You, of course, may change the status of any message, and in so doing, the “Learning” is refined. You can look at the statistics that MailWasher is accumulating under the Tools menu. You can if you wish, “Quick Reply” to a message from within MailWasher. If you use this tool, MailWasher calls up your email program, with the “To: field filled in, just as it would from within the email software itself. However, you have not yet downloaded the message to your own computer, so it is being done from your ISP itself. When you minimize MailWasher, it goes to an icon in the system tray. It continues to check your email every x minutes (as you define), and if there is new mail, it starts blinking. Thus you can keep up with incoming mail without it being intrusive.


Weak Points

Reviewer 1. Firetrust’s MailWasher Pro suffers from the same problem as a few other popular spam filters: It does not integrate with your mail client and thus makes it far less than the most convenient antispam tool. In fact, as a stand-alone application that does not offer POP or IMAP proxy filtering, it is more like a second email program that runs on your desktop, downloading mail off your server or servers at regular intervals, and sorting them all in a message window for you to deal with. As a result, rather than “save time” or “increase productivity” as it claims, MailWasher Pro actually increases the amount of time needed to get rid of spam rather than decreasing it like one would expect a spam filter to do. As I mentioned earlier, instead of dealing with one inbox, users must now deal with two. Possibly more important, MailWasher Pro performed rather poorly in my tests: It actually caught less spam that the built in spam filter which AOL provides its users, and its false-positive rate was a regrettable 17 percent—although that could admittedly improve as MailWasher Pro does use Bayesian filtering that will “learn” from its mistake and improve with continued use. Finally, do not be misled by the virus-checking component of this application. It is very rudimentary, at best, and will not replace the need for a good, quality virus scan program.

Reviewer 2. After achieving the point of learning to correctly recognize about half the spam, I have seen little improvement. For a person who has never used MailWasher or any similar application before, setup and configuration can be extremely frustrating and alarming. Even once MailWasher is configured, using it can be baffling to an inexperienced person. I disabled the email application’s automatic checking so MailWasher could do its thing. I created filters to apply to mail currently showing in MailWasher. I clicked Process Mail, thinking this would send the legitimate mail to my OE inbox. MailWasher suddenly hid behind my email application, which sat there doing nothing. I double-clicked a message in Preview Pane to download it; MailWasher went through the motions of downloading, but it’s not in the OE inbox. The message showed in the MailWasher Preview Pane, where it already was. This message was important and had a needed attachment. What did I have to do to access this message’s attachment? (I would eventually discover how to add an attachment column to the Preview Panes, but not until quite some time later.) Meanwhile, I had about 200 new messages showing in MailWasher that I have neglected while trying to get MailWasher to work. There were email notifications that I needed, showing in MailWasher. I created filters for them because I want to receive them. MailWasher moved filtered items up, where I couldn’t see them. I had created filters or otherwise checked what to do with the messages in MailWasher’s Preview Pane. I clicked Process Mail. MailWasher deleted the messages it was supposed to delete. My email client spontaneously came to the foreground so I could see the email in it. However, the messages weren’t there but were still in MailWasher. It was disconcerting to have MailWasher check mail while I was scanning the Preview Pane.

MailWasher responded: Again, a simple misunderstanding how MailWasher works. Better education in the setup wizard is required.

Suddenly the messages I was previewing were no longer in the Preview Pane, replaced by others. Some times the Preview Pane spontaneously scrolled itself back up to the top. Even when it didn’t, I still needed to start from the top again because I didn’t know what MailWasher had done with the messages I was previewing. Either way, I had to start over. It seems to happen at least once every day, particularly when I was scanning the messages that came in overnight because MailWasher checks mail again before I can finish the scan. It also does that when I’m near the bottom of the message list in the Preview Pane and put a message on my Friends list or Blacklist.

MailWasher responded: We agree, the auto-scrolling is annoying. We are looking at fixing this now.

MailWasher doesn’t seem to apply filters consistently. I do business with a particular site, so I made a filter that mail is legitimate when the From field contains their domain. Some times the filter is applied. Some times it didn’t.

MailWasher responded: All filters are processed in the listed order. The possibility exists that no other filter caught the message before their specific filter did.

When it didn’t, mousing over the Learning buttons said, “Not specified for Learning. So I specified for Learning as legitimate. I received another notification from that site. Mouse-over still read, “Not specified for Learning. I click Process Mail and now it says, “Friend”.

MailWasher responded: A default setting is to add the sender to the Friends list when a message is trained as legitimate. It’s optional under SpamTools|Learning|Recognizing Mail.

I’d noticed that certain email messages were handled erratically and I made sure to filter them as legitimate. When I clicked Process Mail, the email client came to the foreground and I still needed to click Send/Receive in my email client, but the message still wouldn’t appear. I brought MailWasher back to the foreground, but the message had disappeared from MailWasher’s Preview Pane. I brought the email client back to the foreground to Send/Receive again, and this time the message appeared. I want to blacklist messages that have no email address in the From field. That seems simple enough to me; yet, it isn’t allowed. Frequently when I download mail with my email application and I discover at least one spam message that MailWasher never showed me;

MailWasher responded: It is likely that the message arrived after the last check in MailWasher but before the reviewer Send/Received in his email program. As MailWasher doesn’t force itself between the mail program and mail server, this is just a bad case of timing.

occasionally, there are several. MailWasher reports trouble with mail servers. but my mail client has no problem with them and downloads a number of spam that MailWasher never even looked at.

MailWasher responded: Without specific details, it’s hard to say what this might be. MailWasher checks mail significantly differently to that if the mail client, so the comparison means little.

Once I activated Spam Tools under the Tools menu, several of my email subscriptions that I have already filtered or added to my Friends list are suddenly marked as “Known Spam”. With some help, I think I’ve come to understand that the Spam Tool that’s marking some of my desired messages as Known Spam is FirstAlert!™. Allowing MailWasher to eliminate messages automatically based on FirstAlert!™, without the user reviewing them would be a big mistake. There needs to be some way to provide feedback to FirstAlert!™, such as reporting erroneously reported spam. I used to set my Spam Throttle at 50 lines. Then I set it back to 30 lines. Part of what I’m trying to do is avoid wasting bandwidth. Now the minimum setting appears to be 200 lines.

MailWasher responded: When checking messages against FirstAlert, the minimum amount of lines MailWasher must download is 200.

Why do people I never heard of wind up on my Friends list?

MailWasher responded: A default setting is to add the sender to the Friend's list when a message is trained as legitimate. It is optional under Spam Tools|Learning|Recognizing Mail.

When I receive phishing and Nigeria scams and the like, I wish I could forward them to the Federal Trade Commission’s UCE reporting address directly from MailWasher.

MailWasher responded: Not in MailWasher.

There are certain messages that I have agreed to receive, so I have no business reporting them as spam; but I don’t want to look at them. Must learning as junkmail always activate Reporting by default?

MailWasher responded: This is misuse of the learning filters, as presumably the contents of the message would be inherently similar to other legitimate style of messages,

I continue to have moments of panic when I think that MailWasher has deleted something I wanted to keep because the scroll bar on MailWasher’s message list indicates that it is at the top of the list when it is not. I think I have determined that this occurs when MailWasher is either downloading or processing mail. I’m not sure about that because MailWasher frequently seems to download or process mail while allowing no indication to the user that it is doing so. I frequently find that “Known spam” is marked for learning, but not for deletion.

MailWasher responded: This is a result of the training. Based on its previous users training, MailWasher believes the message to be legitimate. Again, a usability issue. It is too confusing for users, so we are changing FirstAlert to take full precedence.

A number of times, I have attempted to choose that messages blocked by Spamcop be marked for deletion, only to discover that I already chose that. It doesn’t work.

MailWasher responded: Same as above.

Reviewer 3. There really weren’t any major weak points but if I had to complain about something it would have to be that it is a bit on the bulky side from a memory standpoint. It was listed as taking up 23Mb. It would be nice if they could get it under 10.

Reviewer 4. I have had no real problems with MailWasher Pro, once I got my friendly list sorted out. It still misses one occasionally, which is to be expected.

Reviewer 5. I must confess that I have found very little to complain about. The programme is very well designed, and given the time that it will save you from ploughing through the yards of spam that we are afflicted with these days, is well worth its price.


Other Comments

Reviewer 1. While support for MailWasher Pro is available from a very dedicated support team who answer questions seemingly regardless of the day of week (I was actually contacted on a Sunday!), one wonders: Why didn’t the people at Firetrust add a few more features to MailWasher Pro and turn it into a real email program? At least users could then get rid of their current email program and just have one inbox with which to deal. The bottom line: If your existing mail program doesn’t have adequate spam filters of its own then you may want to give MailWasher a try. But most new mail programs already offer spam filtering and even the ability to deactivate spam beacons, and upgrading to one may cost less than buying MailWasher Pro. Additionally, the more standard mail filters are less messy to work with and will dump your spam into one mailbox that you can glance at before deleting. I for one am just not ready to have to deal with running two email programs to check my email, and I suspect that most people will not want to bother either, or tire of doing so after a short time. There are better ways to rid yourself of spam and most require only a little responsible decision making on your own part. There is indeed an epidemic of spam but there is no reason you have to be infected nor do you have to be a carrier of the contagion. While MailWasher does not use a great deal of resources it does use about 15MB of memory and it did increase my CPU use by approximately 2% so it does have a noticeable footprint and certainly could slow an older machine down a bit.

Reviewer 2. A strange thing started coinciding with installing MailWasher. When I click URL links in Outlook Express, the Web sites have always re-used the same window of Internet Explorer to display in. Now Outlook Express opens a new Internet Explorer window for each link I click, causing a horrific proliferation of excess windows. I’m tempted to uninstall MailWasher to find out if that solves this problem. I just don’t look forward to figuring out how to reload all my filters if I decide to reinstall it. MailWasher sure did produce a lot of errors while logging in to Hotmail. What does “disconnected gracefully” mean? Within a few weeks, Hotmail’s servers eventually stopped responding to any connection from my computer. Due to Hotmail’s unresponsive Customer Support, I have no way of knowing if this has anything to do with MailWasher. Once this happened, I noticed fewer spam messages that never appeared in MailWasher passed to the mail client without filtering and a lot fewer access errors reported. The reason seems to be that Hotmail detects that it’s MailWasher checking the mail. Therefore, when Hotmail sends their own advertising messages to my account, they won’t let MailWasher access the message, much less remove it. What’s the point of having a Stop button that won’t stop MailWasher from trying to do what it has utterly failed to do for several minutes already? When the Hotmail server stopped responding, I never could Process Mail any more because the button was grayed out while MailWasher was obsessed with logging in to the unresponsive server. MailWasher still checked the other accounts on a regular basis, but it was still trying to log in to the Hotmail account that never responded the last time it checked mail. I suspected this occurred because I followed MailWasher’s recommendation to check accounts simultaneously. I wanted to change that option, but Options were grayed out. Hours later, I had to close, and abandon the work I’d done in the Preview Pane. I have set the default mail check interval at 10 minutes, so why does the Preview Pane’s status bar say that mail was last checked 14 minutes ago? Once I have checked mail manually, why did it say mail was last checked 15 minutes ago?

MailWasher responded: There are two bugs relating to recent Hotmail changes. We are working on these now. As with any proprietary system such as Hotmail however, there’s a significant amount of work involved and little or no documentation to work from. As a result of these types of problems, we are very likely not to look to add support for any more proprietary systems.

Reviewer 3.  I have many email accounts with my main one being an account that is on an exchange server which is not configured to use IMAP. It would have been nice if I could have integrated the engine into Outlook connect to the exchange server. Outlook has its own spam filter, but this one was much easier to work with. For those with GMail accounts, since GMail does not support POP, it cannot benefit from MailWasher.

Reviewer 4. MailWasher Pro is an excellent program and can help one wade through the mess of spam that so many suffer from.

Reviewer 5. I have been using the Freeware version of MailWasher for a few years now. The additional tools now provided in the Pro version, and the time that it saves in dealing with the flood of totally unwanted and undesired scumware clogging our mailboxes make it well worth the price of the software. Thank you Nick Bolton.

Will you continue to use it?

Reviewer 1. No.

Reviewer 2. I’m not sure. It’s a lot of trouble. However, I’ve gone to a lot of trouble to set it up too.

Reviewer 3. Probably not, but not because I didn’t like it. I just don’t get that much mail from my non-exchange e-mail. But if I used AOL or relied more on my POP or Hotmail accounts, I would definitely use it.

Reviewer 4. Yes, absolutely. It has become a constantly used program.

Reviewer 5. Absolutely.

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