Spam Filter Software

[Bigaldoc]

Some of you remember that I've used MailWasher (now MailWasher Pro) ever since it was a freebie. The reason I like it is that it checks my one or more email accounts at the prescribed time interval and let's me see the emails WITHOUT actually downloading to my hard drive. I firmly believe that it catches not only junk (spam) but possible dangerous stuff. Training it and developing custom filters can be a bit tricky especially when a completely new version is released as it was lately. But it seldom gets anything wrong.

Yesterday I received an email from one of my Facebook friends who happens to work at the nursing home. MW marked it as spam and when I previewed the email, it did seem to come from her and had 8 or 10 addressees, including my special email address that I use on Facebook. The thing that convinced me that she may be getting "spoofed" is that the body of the email contained ONLY a URL link that looks (possibly) dangerous to me. Please don't visit this link for your own possible protection: www . stm8 . xmedx . com (intentionally dummied so it isn't clickable.)

Anyway, I immediately sent her a private message about it but she hasn't logged on to FB yet.

The reason for this long-winded post is to ask fellow Loungers what YOU use for spam protection, since MailWasher is all I know. I'm gonna try to suggest something to my fellow FB friends but I'd rather not mention only MW if there are other choices that you would suggest.

Edited to add a Whois for that suspicious URL:

2010-09-11_085612.png

[Leif]

The reason for this long-winded post is to ask fellow Loungers what YOU use for spam protection,

Level 1:
1&1 host our domains. Since switching to them, I would estimate 95% of the spam we used to get doesn't even make it to our accounts. I believe they use pretty strict black-list checking and 'unverified' emails don't even get a look in. They have optional spam filtering which catches the run-of-the-mill Nigerian/casino/replica watches stuff and drops it into a separate folder (and automatically deleted after 28 days). A list of trapped messages is emailed to me overnight. We experience about one false-positive a month, and it also intercepts embedded viruses.

Level 2:
Our in-house mail-server, MDaemon, collects mail from 1&1 and drops it into local mail boxes. The built-in Spam filter works on a grading system and all suspect emails have a score prefixed into the Subject line. 99% of this is UCE, and because of the strict level I have set, we get a relatively high rate of initial false-positives until the sender is white-listed.

UCE is an unfortunate fact of life - I resent having to 'unsubscribe' from something I never subscribed to in the first place - but MDaemon has an address blacklist feature which will refuse to download/accept mail from specific addresses or domains.

[stuck]

My (UK) ISP has a spam filter that you enable via the webmail facility. It quarantines stuff in a webmail junk folder so it never POPs to my PC. If I want I can review the junk and/or delete it via webmail but I never bother, it's never been wrong in all the years I've used it!

Also there are both a 'whitelist' and 'blacklist' options. The latter though isn't much use, you can't keep it up to date, to much junk, too many pointless addresses. The whitelist is handy though.

Maybe your friend's ISP has a similar system?

Ken