So everybody hates spam, and everybody’s got too much of it, and there’s way too much software out there claim to fight it and most of it is junk. It requires hours of fiddling and tweaking, frequently drops your important mail and worst of all, often just doesn’t do what it promises.

But don’t despair! There’s a great answer here in Mailwasher Pro. 

Why “spam”?

Spam is a meat-based product manufactured by Hormel Foods Corporation. Episode 25 in Season 2 of Monty Python’s Flying Circus was called spam. It was set in a restaurant at breakfast where customers could order only spam, spam and more spam. It had a bunch of Vikings singing “spam spam spam” By the way, this is available on DVD now. The full text of the sketch is also available online at many places, including here. You can also listen to it on real audio here.

Same thing with email. You can’t have breakfast without spam. You can’t have email without spam. And more spam.

So what is spam anyway?

Basically, it’s unsolicited, mindless, bulk or mass mail sent by email or posted to the Usenet newsgroups. It is an unwanted, invasive and truly horrible way of advertising. (I mean hasn’t anyone figured out that this kind of advertising is actually counter-productive?). There’s lots of stuff about it on the Internet. A succinct explanation is at this site. A slightly more detailed explanation is at the spam.abuse site.

What’s to be done about it?

Well, quite a lot actually. First thing is never, never, never reply to spam. Especially if someone asks you to reply to have yourself removed, don’t do it. This only lets the spammer know you’ve received the spam mail in your box. You’re going to get flooded.

Second, never let your email address be used on a website. (If you’re creating a webpage, mangle your email address.)

Chances are, you’re still going to get bombarded with ads asking if you want to make your penis larger, or offering viagra for women or some such. You could, of course, sit and delete all the rubbish, but who’s got the time for that?

A great solution.

Well, here it is. I tried a whole bunch of these spam protectors and eliminators and nothing worked as well as MailWasherPro. It’s a snap to set up, works beautifully and reduces the unwanted clutter in your box to zero.

Here’s what it does: it retrieves the headers of your mails from your inbox and shows them to you with sender’s name, subject and the first 20 lines (you can tweak that easily) in a separate interface. You can then tick the ones you want and the ones you don’t. It kills the mails marked for deletion. But it does a whole lot more. It has a nifty fuzzy logic engine and uses the heuristics admirably so it automatically detects spam and potential spam and marks it accordingly. It runs the mails against blacklists so that known offenders gets automatically blacklisted. You can also add to the blacklist — either an individual or an entire domain. It knocks them all off, but leaves intact anyone it doesn’t know or who is in your friends list. Best of all, it uses wildcards — remember that slew of mails from someass@ew01.rubbish.com and another from someotherass@ew02.rubbish.com? Well, if you just say ‘rubbish.com’ or ‘*@ew0*.rubbish’, all those ‘rubbish’ mails will get blacklisted.

I strongly recommend this product - the best way to keep your mail spam-free.