Re: Does it work?

Petzl wrote:
> "Ejo" <[email protected]> wrote in message 
> news:[email protected]...
>> Petzl wrote:
>>> "Gareth" <[email protected]> wrote in message 
>>> news:[email protected]...
> [S
>>> Mail washer is a good option (not as good as SpamCop email)
>>> just turn the "bounce annoyance" off
>> Have you tried spampal already, it is free and it essentially offers the 
>> same functionality as MW.
> 
> Does SpamPal offer automated reporting the spammers or does it just delete 
> (not used SpamPal)

Petzl:

Spampal will add information to the header or subject of an e-mail 
telling you whether IPs in the mail header were listed in a public or 
local blacklist, or whether e-mail is considered to be spam according to 
a configurable regular expression filter. Spampal can be configured in 
any way you like it. It strongly reminds me of spamassassin except that 
it works under windows as a proxy server, either locally or as a system 
service.

You wouldn't notice whether spampal runs on your PC, the icon in the 
system tray indicates that it is busy and this happens only when a mail 
program like thunderbird, outlook or anything else is using pop or imap 
to read a mailbox. In this way the retrieval speed of e-mail is slightly 
reduced since spampal is busy with the rDNS lookups, although that would 
also be the case if you had used MW. DNS lookups results are therefore 
temporarily stored within spampal (and probably MW) to speed up the process.

After spampal you have to find your own way within a mail program to 
handle annotated e-mail. To report spam you forward all eligible labeled 
e-mail to your spamcop reporting account. My experience is that this 
works best in thunderbird since outlook has the nasty habit of pruning 
e-mail headers. It is possible in outlook to retrieve the entire header, 
but is a more complicated.

The combination of spampal and thunderbird has the same functionality as 
mailwasher. Actually I think spampal is to be preferred over mailwasher 
since you have to deal with only one mail program rather than several 
since mailwasher is a separate mail client. Working with MW means that 
you have to manually interact with MW, with spampal that is not the 
case, and this saves me time. Furthermore spampal is free.

Some functions in mailwasher are not easy to emulate with spampal, one 
of them is the use of Firetrust's own reporting service. But I don't 
care to miss that service since it is poorly performing. Actually, I 
started first with MW, later to find out the hard way that spampal is 
making life easier.

> 
> MailWasher not only stops spam but also allows basic reporting

MW sets spew aside in a separate folder just like everyone does. To the 
best of my knowledge nothing will really stop spam.

> 
> The best though is forking out the $US30 for a SpamCop email account which 
> not only stops spam getting to ones inbox but also allows Very Easy 
> Reporting (VER) of these spammers effectively closing their ability to send 
> spam BEFORE it gets sent. Often making the ISP aware of spamming activity 
> and SpamCop listing/blocking the spam IP source identified until spam stops.


Many of us have several mail accounts that offer filtering of spam. In 
total I have four of those including fastmail. I never tried the spamcop 
email account service but I bet it is pretty much the way fastmail works.

> 
> SpamCop is a very powerful weapon against spammers.
> SpamCop email makes stopping and reporting spam very easy

That is true, I prefer to use its rDNS lookup service and I do 
occasionally report spam the way I described above.

Ejo