Mailwasher – Email Spam Software Review
Mailwasher is a piece of software that claims to be able to help you fight email spam. Here we look at how the product works and whether it is worth the money.
Mailwasher is easily downloaded from the Firetrust site and is quick to get set up. Once ready, it will look at emails that are sitting on your email server before you have downloaded them. You can then elect to delete them if they look like spam. This will mean that you never have to download another spam email to your computer.
On a practical note, Mailwasher is very easy to use on a day-to-day basis. I simply click the shortcut on the desktop at the start of the day and it tells me what emails are waiting to be downloaded. These are nicely color coded into green (from a friend), red (spam) or white (unclassified). I then use the software to delete the spam or unwanted emails by clicking the ‘Process’ icon. This also automatically opens up Microsoft Outlook, so I can download all my wanted emails.
For the program to work properly you have to do a little bit of setting up. The main thing is to stop Outlook’s feature of checking new email messages every 10 minutes and immediately downloading them. You can have Mailwasher running in the background and this will immediately alert you when a new email message has arrived. This is by an icon at the bottom of the screen and also an audible alert (you can turn this off). You then check to see if the email is OK in Mailwasher, before downloading it using Outlook.
It takes a long time to write the process out, but it’s actually very quick to carry out. I’ve found the software very useful and have been a user for about 4 years. If you are on a dial-up or slow connection, Mailwasher could save a lot of time because you won’t be downloading everything that comes to your inbox.
