spam (OE6)

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Any recommendations for a cheap (preferably free) intuitive and modestly effective anti-spam filter for the home machine?
Thanks

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I use the “Delete key” and comes with every computer.

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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I use the “Delete key” and comes with every computer.

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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John–

This SPAM…not the meat May 19, 2003 thread has a number of suggestions as does this Beyesian Spam Filter thread May 25, 2003 from Software Finds and Wants Section of the Lounge. They also analyze some of your options critically. I appreciate the time tested efficiency of Dave’s method.

hth,

SMBP

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Most programs will allow items sent to a Junk folder or the Deleted folder. But one MUST use the junk folder or you may miss that email from grandma that got sent there by error. So bottom line is the “Delete Key”.

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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Most programs will allow items sent to a Junk folder or the Deleted folder. But one MUST use the junk folder or you may miss that email from grandma that got sent there by error. So bottom line is the “Delete Key”.

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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John–

This SPAM…not the meat May 19, 2003 thread has a number of suggestions as does this Beyesian Spam Filter thread May 25, 2003 from Software Finds and Wants Section of the Lounge. They also analyze some of your options critically. I appreciate the time tested efficiency of Dave’s method.

hth,

SMBP

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Hi, John ~

Bayesian spam filters simply are too easy for spammers to get around, inevitably resulting in both false positives and false negatives and wasting your time combing through the silly spam folders which is what the program is supposed to prevent in the first place.

I highly recommend eMousetrap which uses a simple auto-authorizing white listing method and seamlessly imports addresses and settings for Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Netscape & Pegasus. Free to try, flash tutorial and forum also available.

I have been using this for some time now and can report 100% proper filtering.

Bob

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Hi, John ~

Bayesian spam filters simply are too easy for spammers to get around, inevitably resulting in both false positives and false negatives and wasting your time combing through the silly spam folders which is what the program is supposed to prevent in the first place.

I highly recommend eMousetrap which uses a simple auto-authorizing white listing method and seamlessly imports addresses and settings for Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Netscape & Pegasus. Free to try, flash tutorial and forum also available.

I have been using this for some time now and can report 100% proper filtering.

Bob

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Uh-oh, he wants it all.

I use SAProxy. It’s free and over 93% effective with almost no “false positives,” but it’s definitely a bit of work to set up, and to “train” it to get the effectiveness from, say, 85% to 95%, involves quite a few steps of manual labor.

Stata Labs, which developed SAProxy from a combination of various open source projects and other code, has now released a commercial version that is not free. The free version still can be found, here: http://www.statalabs.com/knowledgesystem/w…proxy_1.2.1.htm%5B/url%5D (Note: in SAProxy, you need to turn off the “network” tests that check the message against black hole lists, or performance becomes very slow.)

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Thanks very much, folks, I’ll put some cheese in the emousetrap (and use the delete key from time to time, no doubt.)

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I am very pleased with Mail Washer. There is a free version which allows only One pop3 account. It is a two step process. Run Mailwasher, it scans your mail server displaying header an catagorizing as Spam, Probable spam, blank and friends. The spam and probable spam are already check to be deleted and blocked. You right click any email to filter as you see fit.
For 100 messages 80 spam it take about 30 seconds. It does get better as you train it. There is also an ongoing database of known spammers you can ork from if you wish.

click ‘process’ and the spam are deletd, new name are added to freinds or blocked list and then the remaining good mails are downloaded into your email client.
It is great if you come home and run it. It i more of a pain if you are on all the time.

http://www.mailwasher.net/

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Gaddy,

Have you tried Mousetrap yet?
It will do all of those things automatically for you. Also other “spam” filters will come up with what they think is new mail, when the spammers send a message from ( for example) yuyuug@ doit.com and the next machine generated message has one or two letters changed to like uyyyug@dontdoit.com. Using phony addresses gets by whatever you have marked as spamenemies every time.
Mousetrap denies them.

Bob

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Bob,
I know it has been a long time so I hope you see this.
I am more pleased with mailwasher as time goes on. This big advantage as I see it si that it does NOT download email and then scan it. I looks on the server and scans, so you only download what you want. In that way it can save more time than it take to browse it.
There’s a wrench for every nut. I got mine.

If we are happy, the world is a better place. (This is where the violins start up)

Happy cleaning

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As a technical question, how could MailWasher force the scan to occur on the server? I don’t see how that’s possible. I suspect it’s constantly downloading messages (outside of Outlook Express) so that it just seems to be instant when you retrieve mail. A good trick, if not quite as good as never downloading in the first place.

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As a technical question, how could MailWasher force the scan to occur on the server? I don’t see how that’s possible. I suspect it’s constantly downloading messages (outside of Outlook Express) so that it just seems to be instant when you retrieve mail. A good trick, if not quite as good as never downloading in the first place.

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I don’t know how it’s doing it, but I can confirm that that’s what it says it’s doing – which is good because it means it can bounce emails that you don’t want and the sender thinks the email address doesn’t exist (at least, that’s also what it says) – and that it certainly appears to be doing just that!

I too am very pleased with Mailwasher; I have so far escaped the current virus collection due to its ability to reject emails without every letting them onto my machine and on at least one occasion it enabled me to sort a friend’s machine that became infected (it used other information from his machine that couldn’t have been there if the ‘from’ had been faked).

Just my

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I think you will find the the scan is being done on the MailWasher server and NOT your ISP’s server. The email is down loaded from your ISP’s server to the MailWasher’s server and the scanning is done and then down loaded to your computer. This is how the third party spam and virus blockers work. They do not and can not access your ISP’s server and run programs on it. If they can we will ALL be in for deep dodo as the the spammers will be able to control the servers.

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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I think you will find the the scan is being done on the MailWasher server and NOT your ISP’s server. The email is down loaded from your ISP’s server to the MailWasher’s server and the scanning is done and then down loaded to your computer. This is how the third party spam and virus blockers work. They do not and can not access your ISP’s server and run programs on it. If they can we will ALL be in for deep dodo as the the spammers will be able to control the servers.

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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Also, the mails you may think are being ‘bounced’ are in fact not. The sender will never think that the address is no good as the sender will never get a ‘bounced’ message. The return address is bogus in nearly all cases of spam.

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Also, the mails you may think are being ‘bounced’ are in fact not. The sender will never think that the address is no good as the sender will never get a ‘bounced’ message. The return address is bogus in nearly all cases of spam.

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I don’t know how it’s doing it, but I can confirm that that’s what it says it’s doing – which is good because it means it can bounce emails that you don’t want and the sender thinks the email address doesn’t exist (at least, that’s also what it says) – and that it certainly appears to be doing just that!

I too am very pleased with Mailwasher; I have so far escaped the current virus collection due to its ability to reject emails without every letting them onto my machine and on at least one occasion it enabled me to sort a friend’s machine that became infected (it used other information from his machine that couldn’t have been there if the ‘from’ had been faked).

Just my

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I use Mailwasher and it’s a lifesaver. I started on the weekend of the Sobig Virus when I was getting hundreds of mail items each one with a 157Kb attachment so that my ISP connection was timing out before I could download everything from my mail server.

Mailwasher only polls for the mail header info – you can view the sender, title and size info in no time at all and this info is then routed to Mailwasher’s own servers where it is compared with their own list of probable spam messages/sources etc.

90% of the time it’s clear from the header info whether it is spam or not. If you need to view the body of the message, double click on a header and the body text is displayed in chunks – attachments stay on the server until you request them.

You can set your own list of Friends and your own Blacklist, so (unlike Emoustrap) you can still receive mass mailings (but only those you choose to download).

The main advantage of Mailwasher is that it is so quick – there’s no hanging about waiting for messages to be downloaded. When you have previewed the headers you can process the remaining messages for download. Mailwasher then signs on to your mail server and performs the server side ‘deletes’ and ‘gets’ – you get the mail and all the trash just disappears. You CAN set to bounce spam, but to be honest, the internet doesn’t need that wasted bandwidth.

So in answer to your question – the scan process is partly based on sending address, mostly on your scanning the header info; and there’s no need for a scan process on the server. You ask for ‘never downloading in the first place’, in fact that’s just what you get.

Owen

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One more post and I will drop out of this one before it is beat to death. I MailWasher displays all headers. Occasionally I drift through the BlackList looking for good ones I have marked. I may be the only one but I have accidentally put someone I wanted as a freind into my ‘BAD’ list.. If I am told that someone is sending me email and I am not getting it, I can easily edit the “black list’ in mailwasher, find them and change it back. None of these features are unique to spam blockers but the package in complete, flexible. easy to work. Is one step away from automatic so I am actually aware of the process (which I like).

If you only have a few spams a day this would be an annoying process but if you get more than 15 or 20 when you open your Email client, this is a worthy download. The free version works for one account, I paid for the pro and use it for all my accounts.

No I don’t work for them.

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One more post and I will drop out of this one before it is beat to death. I MailWasher displays all headers. Occasionally I drift through the BlackList looking for good ones I have marked. I may be the only one but I have accidentally put someone I wanted as a freind into my ‘BAD’ list.. If I am told that someone is sending me email and I am not getting it, I can easily edit the “black list’ in mailwasher, find them and change it back. None of these features are unique to spam blockers but the package in complete, flexible. easy to work. Is one step away from automatic so I am actually aware of the process (which I like).

If you only have a few spams a day this would be an annoying process but if you get more than 15 or 20 when you open your Email client, this is a worthy download. The free version works for one account, I paid for the pro and use it for all my accounts.

No I don’t work for them.

Reply | Quote

I use Mailwasher and it’s a lifesaver. I started on the weekend of the Sobig Virus when I was getting hundreds of mail items each one with a 157Kb attachment so that my ISP connection was timing out before I could download everything from my mail server.

Mailwasher only polls for the mail header info – you can view the sender, title and size info in no time at all and this info is then routed to Mailwasher’s own servers where it is compared with their own list of probable spam messages/sources etc.

90% of the time it’s clear from the header info whether it is spam or not. If you need to view the body of the message, double click on a header and the body text is displayed in chunks – attachments stay on the server until you request them.

You can set your own list of Friends and your own Blacklist, so (unlike Emoustrap) you can still receive mass mailings (but only those you choose to download).

The main advantage of Mailwasher is that it is so quick – there’s no hanging about waiting for messages to be downloaded. When you have previewed the headers you can process the remaining messages for download. Mailwasher then signs on to your mail server and performs the server side ‘deletes’ and ‘gets’ – you get the mail and all the trash just disappears. You CAN set to bounce spam, but to be honest, the internet doesn’t need that wasted bandwidth.

So in answer to your question – the scan process is partly based on sending address, mostly on your scanning the header info; and there’s no need for a scan process on the server. You ask for ‘never downloading in the first place’, in fact that’s just what you get.

Owen

Reply | Quote

Bob,
I know it has been a long time so I hope you see this.
I am more pleased with mailwasher as time goes on. This big advantage as I see it si that it does NOT download email and then scan it. I looks on the server and scans, so you only download what you want. In that way it can save more time than it take to browse it.
There’s a wrench for every nut. I got mine.

If we are happy, the world is a better place. (This is where the violins start up)

Happy cleaning

Reply | Quote

Gaddy,

Have you tried Mousetrap yet?
It will do all of those things automatically for you. Also other “spam” filters will come up with what they think is new mail, when the spammers send a message from ( for example) yuyuug@ doit.com and the next machine generated message has one or two letters changed to like uyyyug@dontdoit.com. Using phony addresses gets by whatever you have marked as spamenemies every time.
Mousetrap denies them.

Bob

Reply | Quote

I am very pleased with Mail Washer. There is a free version which allows only One pop3 account. It is a two step process. Run Mailwasher, it scans your mail server displaying header an catagorizing as Spam, Probable spam, blank and friends. The spam and probable spam are already check to be deleted and blocked. You right click any email to filter as you see fit.
For 100 messages 80 spam it take about 30 seconds. It does get better as you train it. There is also an ongoing database of known spammers you can ork from if you wish.

click ‘process’ and the spam are deletd, new name are added to freinds or blocked list and then the remaining good mails are downloaded into your email client.
It is great if you come home and run it. It i more of a pain if you are on all the time.

http://www.mailwasher.net/

Reply | Quote

Thanks very much, folks, I’ll put some cheese in the emousetrap (and use the delete key from time to time, no doubt.)

Reply | Quote

Uh-oh, he wants it all.

I use SAProxy. It’s free and over 93% effective with almost no “false positives,” but it’s definitely a bit of work to set up, and to “train” it to get the effectiveness from, say, 85% to 95%, involves quite a few steps of manual labor.

Stata Labs, which developed SAProxy from a combination of various open source projects and other code, has now released a commercial version that is not free. The free version still can be found, here: http://www.statalabs.com/knowledgesystem/w…proxy_1.2.1.htm%5B/url%5D (Note: in SAProxy, you need to turn off the “network” tests that check the message against black hole lists, or performance becomes very slow.)

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