Caught a rec from a reader on Facebook, and it seems to be a good one. MailWasher—a freeware. It parks itself like a vulture on the phone-wire, so to speak, and picks off what you designate as bad sources. It can even (read the tips they provide) keep you from even seeing them, if it’s a habitual and obnoxious offender. The other spams it will let you see, and you can change their status.
From 50 annoyances a day, one day gave me the joy of tagging them, and the next day—absent from my awareness. Works with Thunderbird and various other mail programs. Pretty easy to set up: it’ll give you a convenient icon of your e-mail provider which you can use to access it, and a trash bin you can take a look at before nuking wholesale. Pretty hard to lose a good e-mail, and the clutter in the mailbox is history: you can now see the ones you need to see and be rid of the junk.
Comment: For those who are Mac-centric a similar program which is called SpamSieve and works with all of the major Mac email clients like Mail, Postbox, Outlook for Mac. I’ve been using it for years. Has free trial with licence being $30. All updates after that are free.
Thank you for that note.
It is giving me particular joy to blacklist sources that have besieged my mailbox daily for the last year despite ‘de-list’ requests. Several are in Spanish, to boot.
For some odd reason, about a third of the spam I get on one of my email addresses is in Serbian (or an equally unlikely Eastern European language). Go figure.
I’ve used Mailwasher for almost 10 years and swear “by” it (rather than “at” it!). I have it set up to run in the background. Everything comes to it first, and I can preview the email without actually opening it, which has saved my bacon from viruses more than once. One feature I really like is the “bounce” feature that lets you bounce email — i.e., it gets rejected because Mailwasher tells it your email addy is not a valid email address. This cuts way down on the spam you get because you had to give an email address to some on line business in order to buy whatever it was, and they sell your email addy to other businesses and then you get humpty zillion emails. Mailwasher has cut way, way down on the spam I get. Worth every penny. I have five email addies, depending on the “melant’i” involved (which “hat” I happen to be wearing). One email addy is only for close friends and family — people I know face to face. Another one is for people I meet on line, my blog friends, etc. Another is my shopping one, the one I always give when some business wants an email address before they will sell me something. Another one I use only for work situations — now that I’m retired, that one may get retired, too. The fifth one is for on-line content — webcomics and forums and things like Netflix and such like that you have to sign up for. Mailwasher is flexible and versatile enough that it can handle all these emails and facilitate their use. Every email I get goes through Mailwasher first. Some of them get no further. And I get a great deal of pleasure bouncing the obnoxious ones.
I’ve been using Box Trapper for my business emails, which InMotionHosting supplied along with our email hosting on my husband’s company website, but I’ll look into Mail Washer for my other email addresses that don’t get delivered through that server. I’ve heard through the grapevine that Verizon will be dumping its email service and those of us who want to keep our Verizon.net email address will have to transition to using AOL, though we will still be able to use the verizon.net email. I’ve had that one for so long I’d never be able to change the address with all the places and people that I’ve given it to.
quel pain!