MailWasher Pro Review Overall Rating:

Description

MailWasher is a proxy type filter that filters mail using a combination of Bayesian filtering, Whitelist/Blacklist (Using user-defined lists and Internet Blacklists (RBLS)) and content-based filtering.

Being a proxy type filter, it is intended that you turn off automatic checking on your regular e-mail client and let MailWasher periodically check your e-mail servers and deal with any spam messages found there before you use your regular e-mail client to retrieve the (hopefully) good mail left.
It has the ability to "bounce", or send fake undeliverable messages to senders in the hope of getting your address removed from the spammer's mailing list. As has been mentioned many times before, this particular facility has very limited usefulness as the "from" address in a spam message will almost certainly have been forged.

Verdict

With a simple and uncluttered interface, MailWasher is an easy to use application. We did have some slight reservations about the filtering capabilities - particularly the Bayesian engine - which let more spam through than we would have liked, but on the whole a very capable filter.

There is one thing however that does set MailWasher apart from many others in its class: A lot have the the ability to check Pop3 and MAPI accounts (Pop3 accounts are "the norm" and are the ones most often provided by a home user's ISP - MAPI accounts are usually used in a corporate or small business environment where there is a central mail server in operation), but
MailWasher has the ability to check Hotmail and AOL "Web based" e-mail accounts also.
This is not a feature we see a great deal of in spam filters and for someone using these type of accounts regularly, this could well swing your decision toward MailWasher Pro.

Installation

Installation went without a hitch. After installation, a handy wizard started which offered the ability to automatically scan for your existing e-mail settings (and friends lists), or to leave the user to do it manually.

MailWasher did a commendable job of importing existing e-mail accounts from Microsoft Outlook and adding the contacts to its friends list.

Interface

MailWasher Pro is notable by its simple and uncluttered interface. Not at all "flashy", but to the point.
With little more than one main form, two settings forms and one statistics form, it really should not amount to a steep learning curve for the new user:

The main form has just 5 main buttons. Most daily operations are simple 1, or 2 click procedures.

The rest of the interface is equally straight forward.

Like a lot of modern spam filters, MailWasher provides some statistics on its performance over time. These statistics are presented with numbered analysis and basic graphs:

All in all, MailWasher's interface can be summed up as straightforward and functional. Not exactly exciting, but eminently usable.

Features and Operation

Having set up your e-mail accounts with the aid of MailWasher's straightforward new account wizard, MailWasher will periodically connect to your e-mail server and retrieve all, or part of the messages found there. Having applied its filtering, messages are marked as spam or legitimate and are presented in a colour-coded listing.

This may be just our consensus of opinion, but we would rather see legitimate and spam messages very distinctly separated into different areas, views or folders. Having them displayed together in this manner, no matter how clearly marked, leaves us thinking that we haven't really achieved that much. We seem to be just scanning through the messages in the list looking for any good ones. Isn't that what we do when we don't have a spam filter?

Of course, this can easily be avoided by setting MailWasher to open your e-mail client when it receives a message that it deems to be legitimate. In this way, you should only be seeing the good messages in your e-mail client and when you open up MailWasher to check for false positives, all the good messages should have disappeared as you have already read them in your regular e-mail client.
Given Mailwasher's nice display of message content though, many users will use MailWasher as their primary mail reader and so will be faced with this problem.
We liked MailWasher's display of the message content. One click gives you access to the "raw" form of the message - complete with headers and HTML markup. We particularly liked the ability to click on hyperlinks and "mailto" links found in the message body. A nice touch for a text-only display.

Messages finding their way into your inbox would have had to run the gauntlet of quite a few different filtering mechanisms as follows:

• Friends list - As is normal, a friends list is maintained which evade all filtering.
• Firetrust's own "First Alert" system. This is a community based blacklist. First Alert membership requires a yearly subscription. The first year's membership comes with your purchase of MailWasher Pro.
  We sometimes find these type of spam identification mechanisms can to be problematic in that it only takes one or two people to decide that a particular legitimate message is spam and nobody on the system gets the message. These kind of false positives are have proved to be quite frequent on this type of filtering. Time will tell the effectiveness of this particular system.
• "My own Blacklist" - This is a locally kept list of e-mail addresses from which spam has been received in the past. Could be useful in places but, as mentioned above, all spam messages will have forged from addresses and will change randomly. This will render this type of list useless.
• "My Filters" - These are a set of user-defined filters that look for words or phrases in the header or body of the message. These can be especially useful to ensure that some wanted mail does not get identified as spam. A few choice keywords in here that you know would identify the message as legitimate could really help.
  These types of filters could also prove to be quite powerful for the "savvy" user as they have the ability to perform searches using regular expressions. Regular expressions are an extremely powerful way to perform "wildcard" searches for text. Similar, but much more powerful to the wildcard searches you may be used to in your computer operating system.
  By definition, this restricts the most useful of this functionality to the technically proficient user, but in the right hands could be very useful.
• Bayesian Filtering - Bayesian filtering is very much in favour at the moment, due to its inherent ability to adapt to changing trends in e-mail and "hands-off" work mode. This is probably one of the most powerful features of MailWasher.
• Internet Blacklists - Here MailWasher will check the current message against online databases of "known" spam. Our copy was pre-configured to search in SpamCop and ORDB, but you can add, edit and remove ones of your own choice. As mentioned before, these online lists can prove to be quite effective, but do tend to produce their share of false positives
  

As you can see, MailWasher's arsenal of spam filtering techniques are quite comprehensive and with a little "tweaking" one should be able to put a serious dent in the spammer's efforts.

Accuracy

Given our past experience with online blacklists, and in the interest of testing MailWasher's inherent filtering ability, we disabled RBL checking and relied on its Bayesian filtering capabilities. MailWasher does not come pre-trained, so there is a period where it will need to "learn" what is good mail and what is spam.

We feel that the above needs to be taken into account when reviewing our rather surprising accuracy analysis. We were aware of quite a large number of false negatives during the testing, and this shows in the final figures reported here.

We do, however feel that this figure could be greatly improved upon with the intelligent use of other available filtering techniques and more "learning" time for the Bayesian engine.

Conclusion

MailWasher Pro comes with an impressive array of filtering mechanisms. It is a filter which can be easily managed by the casual user while still offering flexibility for the more technically minded user to fine tune.

Its interface is functional and to the point - not glitzy.

Remember that if you decide to use the "First Alert" online blacklist function, there is a yearly subscription that has to be taken into account with the price of this filter.

We would like to have seen more distinct visual separation of good and bad e-mail in the interface and were quite surprised that our tests returned such a high amount of false negatives for a Bayesian-base filter.

However, there is no denying that MailWasher is a powerful and well equipped filter that will prove highly effective for many people.

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