i've been using a free version of MailWasher v 2 for years and a trojan - ' mail.fucuzzy ' redialer got into my computer via another forum email. the emailer checked his system and discovered it came from him even though he has an outbound email checker as part of the av program he uses (- why didn't his av find it besides the email scan ?) i fixed the problem by removing 3 or 4 files from the computer using HijackThis, my free AntiVir program didn't detect anything on reboot does anyone have experience with these programs ? whether they're standalone such as MailWasher or part of the av program/suite you're using i know that no single av program will detect all infection varieties and one has to use specialist utility/programs to get rid of some, however besides questioning MailWasher i'm wondering what the reliability of any inbound email checker is
Dude, Mailwasher is so 2003... I had it 100 years ago... it's laughably hopeless. This may be hard for you to believe... But GMail virtually eliminates spam... Which proves that spam is an ISP conspiracy... To charge you extra for this or that. Really, read the link... and just get a free account. http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/10/how-gmail-blocks-spam.html And if you MUST use a POP email account... You can still redirect all your mail thru a GMail account... And just use it as a spam cleaner.
Wallace, I've been using free software called K9 (http://keir.net/k9.html) with lot of success - spam detection has been in 99.5% accuracy range for the last 3 years. Out of all spam catchers, including SpamBayes, K9 remains the best imho. Too bad it did not get more credit for it. P.S. In K9, I only use marking something as spam to train K9 what's spam and what not - I don't use white, black lists, blackhole servers, reg expressions, etc - that's how good this software is. K9 uses Bayes with a some proprietary twist which makes it much better than e.g. SpamBayes, and others. Give it a try.
DeeDeeTwo and dc101, thanks for the feedback but the problem isn't spam, i'd thought that previewing emails via mailwasher or another would prevent any attached viruses etc in the email activating when the msg was read: mailwasher 8: " Preview. Easily preview the message in your email to see what the sender has to say before downloading it to your computer. This ensures you won't download any nasty emails to your computer."
Infected messages are spam, so K9 can help you there. Also, you can preview messages in K9. P.S. Which version of Outlook are you using? 2003 version automatically blocks unsafe content - no automatic downloading of images or any other linked content from the websites you did not explicitly marked as safe.