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Anti-spam: FireTrust MailWasher Pro



MailWasher Pro

MailWasher Pro for Mac and Linux also available.


Sample Blacklist
Sample Filters

> Client Side (Desktop) SPAM Filtering Overview

MailWasher Pro allows you to preview multiple accounts and all aspects of your e-mail on the server before you download it to your computer, thus protecting you from spam, viruses, phishing attacks, and other nuisances. The program also learns what kind of e-mail you want to receive and adapts to your preferences. You can then delete unwanted e-mail before it gets to you and even report it to the central FirstAlert database, where it’s verified to ensure no other MailWasher Pro user gets it. Other features help identify and protect you against viruses and worms. Also included are comprehensive, customizable filters, use of public blacklists to identify spammers, and multiple accounts. MailWasher Pro works with POP3, IMAP, Hotmail/MSN, and AOL email accounts.

Pre-screening Emails

Once an account is configured, MailWasher allows users to pre-screen emails by clicking on the ‘Check Mail’ Button. MailWasher works directly with your email server, exactly like your email program does. But there is one important difference: you can tell MailWasher to delete a message at the server, without downloading it. Using a BlackList and Heurtistics, MailWasher Pro is able to determine (with great accuracy) if the message is likely to contain unsolicited email or a virus.

Blacklisting, Whitelisting and other sources of information

In computing, a Blacklist is an access control mechanism, that stands for allow everybody, except members of the blacklist. The opposite, whitelist, means allow nobody, except members of the white list. (source -WikiPedia).

MailWasher Pro also utilizes a constantly updated database of known spammers. If an email is determined to be suspect, it is marked in the “Status” column and automatically set for “Delete”.

> Features

It’s Easy

Simple in design and layout, MailWasher Pro is easy to configure and highly customisable. It imports your existing email server account settings so that you don’t have to set them up from scratch, and it lets you read and preview messages before deleting spam. It only takes a few minutes to learn how to use and the simplistic design allows users of all capabilities to utilise this extremely effective software.

It’s Quick
As MailWasher Pro leaves the body of the message on the ISP server, it works extremely quickly – having clocked amazing speeds of 25 e-mail headers per second – thus saving valuable time and resources that would otherwise be wasted manually filtering e-mail. This security feature also allows only legitimate mail to reach the recipients’ mail program, blocking harmful attachments and viruses before they can infect the user’s computer.

Unique Bounce Feature
MailWasher Pro
returns a message to senders informing them that the recipient’s address is invalid. As spammers think the address no longer exists they will remove recipients from their bulk-mailing lists. Granted, not all spammers bother to clean up their address lists, utilizing the bounce feature introduces the possibility of receiving less spam hitting your mailbox.

Support For Hotmail/MSN, POP3, IMAP, and AOL
MailWasher Pro provides an effective spam-filtering solution for Hotmail’s 110 million users, who are the major targets of spammers and receive around 80% of all spam messages.

Advanced Filtering
MailWasher Pro’s advanced filtering automatically spots spam using customisable blacklists and/or regular expression filters to eliminate potential spam messages.

Inboxes are no longer cluttered with unsolicited advertising and unwanted junk, users receive only legitimate mail and experience e-mail the way it should be!

Howto: Use Typical MailWasher Settings

The short tutorials below outline some of the commonly used spam defenses that MailWasher Pro makes available.

> Enabling MailWasher Pro’s Bayesian spam filter:

Of the many spam filtering tricks up MailWasher Pro’s sleeve, the most potent is the Bayesian filtering. It lets you classify messages easily and learns with every action you take. Quickly, few interventions will be necessary and MailWasher Pro can spot most spam precisely while leaving the good mail for you to read in your email client.

But before either training or filtering can begin, the learning filter needs to be turned on.

  1. Select Tools => Spam Tools from the menu.
  2. Go to the Learning category.
  3. Select the Learning tab.
  4. Make sure Teach MailWasher Pro to recognise your junk mail and legitimate mail is checked.
  5. Now go to the Recognising spam tab.
  6. Make sure Classify message as spam if they resemble the spam MailWasher Pro has been taught is checked.
  7. Finally, go to the Recognising mail tab.
  8. Make sure Classify message as legitimate if they resemble the mail MailWasher Pro has been taught is check as well.
  9. Click OK.

MailWasher Pro is now set up to learn from how you classify messages, and to automatically mark mail it recognizes based on this training.

> “Teaching” MailWasher Pro what you consider Spam:

  1. After following the steps above to enable MailWasher’s Bayesian Filter.
  2. In the message list’s Learning column, make sure the:
    • Spam checkbox is selected for junk mail; and
    • Legitimate checkbox for good messages.

    are both checked

  3. If MailWasher Pro can already classify a message based on what it has learned in the past, you don’t have to teach it again. checkbox matching MailWasher’s classification is disabled.
  4. To correct a mistake made by MailWasher Pro’s analysis, make sure you select the other checkbox.
  5. Press Process Mail to make SpamWasher Pro learn from the new classifications.

> Using Blacklists

Sample Blacklist

In computing, a Blacklist is an access control mechanism, that stands for allow everybody, except members of the blacklist. The opposite, whitelist, means allow nobody, except members of the white list (aka Friendlist). (source -WikiPedia).

Blacklist Use — As with anything else, there are a several different ways of adding addresses (or populating) your Blacklist.

Manual Additions:

  1. Select Tools => Spam Tools => myBlacklist => Add from the menu.
  2. From here you have the choice of adding a specific address (spamkinger@yazhoo.net) or any email address in a specific domain using a wildcard (*@yazhoo.net).

In addition to the catchall asterisk wildcard, a one letter/number at a time option can also be used. ????@yazhoo.net would catch anyone with a four letter username at yazhoo.net.

Importing Blacklist Entries:

  1. Select Help => About
  2. The last hyperlinked line in the window that opens displays the location of your MailWasher files. These are typically found in C:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName\Application Data\MailWasherPro. Click on that hyperlinked line to open the folder.
  3. Exit MailWasher entirely
  4. The plain text file that contains the new blacklist should contain only one email address or wildcarded domain per line. Copy your blocklist.txt file into the folder opened above.
  5. Restart MailWasher & check out your blacklist entries

> Using Whitelists for entire domains

Utilizing Bayesian Filters, Blacklists and having MailWasher learning what should be considered Spam can create a spam barrier that may, on occasion, trigger a “false positive” for legitimate email. Typically, newsletters that contain marketing materials trigger these false positives, which could result in a monthly newsletter going missing. Enter the MailWasher Whitelist (or Friend list). Much like Blacklisting, a Friend list allows you to specify “known good” email addresses and entire domains in much the same way that the Blacklist is created. The example below will create a Friends list rule that allows any email originating from TwistedStudent.com to pass through MailWasher unharmed.

  1. To the right of the MailWasher screen, click on the “Friends list” tab, and click “+Add.”
  2. Select the radio button to the left of “Wildcard Expression” and type in:
    *TwistedStudent.com
    Doing this tells MailWasher to mark any email from TwistedStudent.com as friendly.

Howto: Use Advanced MailWasher Settings

> Installing Custom Filters

Sample Filters
For the most part, the instructions for importing this MailWasherFilters.txt file will read much like those for importing a blacklist.txt file — with a few exceptions, as seen below.

  1. Select Help => About
  2. The last hyperlinked line in the window that opens displays the location of your MailWasher files. These are typically found in C:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName\Application Data\MailWasherPro. Click on that hyperlinked line to open the folder.
  3. Exit MailWasher entirely
  4. Open the filters.txt file in an editor. You can usually do this by right-clicking the file, and choosing “Open With” or “Open”. Use a text or editor (notepad or simpletext should work just fine), as long as “word wrap” is turned off. Highlight the contents of the Filters section of the file linked above, starting with the first “[”, and ending with the last double-quote (”). Hit Ctrl-C. Go back to the filters.txt file, and highlight the contents of the file (usually by hitting Ctrl-A). Hit Ctrl-V, or “Paste”.
  5. Save your file
  6. Restart MailWasher & check out your blacklist entries

> Rolling your own Regular expressions

Character Regular-expression meaning
. One of any character, including space or tab
? Zero or one instance of the previous character (ba?t matches bat or bt, but not boat)
* Zero or more of the preceding character (ba*t matches bt, bat, baat, etc.)
+ One or more of the preceding character (ba+t matches bat, baat, etc. but not bt)

Couple that table with this list of the top 50 spam words and the amount of spam you see in your inbox should plummet.