Jerry Leventer

I decided to give PopFile by SourceForge a try after seeing that About.com gives it a top rating. http://email.about.com/od/windowsspamfightingtools/tp/anti-spam.htm

I decided not to continue using it, however, since it wants to reconfigure all my account settings.

Also, it uses Outlook filtering to place the mail into folders. So you have to tell PopFile to mark each email “Good” or “Bad” and let Outlook Rules Wizard do the work. I am trying to get away from relying on Outlook Rules Wizard due to some inconsistent behavior like creating a second copy of email and moving it to the wrong folder.

On the other hand, MailWasher by FireTrust is working quite well as a spam filter.

It is a bit cumbersome since you have to launch and run it separately from your email client, and it has gotten mixed reviews, although always in the top five. But it is the best one I’ve found so far for my purposes.

As with all the better spam filters, MailWasher uses the Bayesian filtering algorithm. FireTurst also provides FirstAlert! which is a continuously updated database for reporting and filtering spam. It costs $10/year after the 1st year.

You do have to process the mail a bit since it isn’t placed into a folder, but you can sort on any of the colums and group by color. There is also a “hide known spam” selection in the Options settings.

Another advantage to MailWasher Pro is it can be used with non-Windows email clients such as Thunderbird, and it can process both POP3 and IMAP email.

See a good (but old) FirstAlert! article here:
http://www.firetrust.com/about/media/kit/press-release/2003-11-13

Email Filter types and terminology:
http://www.whichspamfilter.com/TypesOfFilters.htm

[tags]Email Spam Filters, FireTrust MailWasher Pro, FirstAlert, PopFile, Outlook [/tags]