Your Spam Filter

This is a difficult category as ordinary users need products that are easy to use and frankly, most free spam filters are way too complex to set up and use. The best products in this class are in fact, shareware not free. That said, MailWasher [1] is for most folks, the best free option.

MailWasher is an email preview utility that allows you to check your email on your mail server before you download it to your PC. The advantage of this approach is that you can kill unwanted messages including spam, viruses and large attachments before they get anywhere near your computer. MailWasher flags for you any messages containing possible spam and viruses for you to quickly check. It's a simple idea but quite effective and one which average users find easy to understand.

At the Mailwasher site you can download a free or "Pro" commercial version. The former lacks quite a few of the features of its commercial cousin. the most limiting of which is the ability to a access multiple accounts. However the last free version of MailWasher before it went commercial is still floating around the web [2] and it will handle multiple accounts. It too lacks many of the advanced spam detection features of the current commercial version but is still very effective. Alternatively, try XTerminator [3] which works much the same way as MailWasher and is totally free. I must say though, I prefer MailWasher's user interface.



[1] http://www.mailwasher.net ( 3.05MB)
[2] http://www.321download.com/LastFreeware/page2.html#Mailwasher (1.57MB)
[3] http://www.artplus.hr/adapps/eng/xterminator.htm (1.87MB)