Anti spam program

[powyco]

Does anyone know of a good, free anti spam program ? I had an excellent one, which sorted junk automatically, and allowed the spam to be reported, but my PC has had problems during which some programs were lost. This was one of them, and I can't remember its name. Any suggestions gratefully received.

[rojash]

Mailwasher is brillo. It gives you more control than a server-side solution, and is more efficient than most e-mail client plugins, because it downloads only the headers and first 200 lines of an e-mail to analyse it.

It's free from http://www.mailwasher.net/

If you have multiple e-mail accounts, you will need the paid for version.

[fo3nix]

Or just use Thunderbird instead, which works much like Outlook but has a great bayesian spam filter.

[powyco]

Thank you both. I'll have a close look at both these suggestions.

[rojash]

Always open to new suggestions, fo3nix, I decided to try Thunderbird the last time you suggested it. So I've been running it for the last two weeks.

The biggest disadvantage is that TB downloads all the e-mails including their attachments before deciding whether or not they're junk.

All the time I was running Mailwasher, my incoming virus checker was largely redundant, because viral attachments didn't even get downloaded.

Also with MW I was getting around 10% false negatives and less than 1% false positives, whereas with TB alone it was more like 25% false negatives and 30% false positives.

MW uses a combination of bayesian, lookups, manually entered rules, whitelist, blacklist. It also allows you to use wildcard entries in the white- and black-lists.

After my trial , I've decided to stick with TB as my client, but keep MW as my spam blocker.

[fo3nix]

Fair enough.

As I'm sure you know, the bayesian filter does need some training. I've been using it for about two years now, perhaps longer, and the filter not detects about 99.9% of my spam. I get about 1 false positive every 8 months or so. Helping it is that my email server runs SpamAssassin, and is actually being moved to DSPAM with IronPorts too, so the server setup is good (and thunderbird automatically moves spam marked server-side to the junk folder).

Just as worth it to me though is the increased security -- Outlook Express is not only a larger target but I'd bet a large sum of money that it's also less secure.