OT: Spam

[Daynarr]

Here is some software I use to get rid of/minimize spam - and I get about 20 spam mails every day.

First the pop-up’s. They get rather annoying especially the ones that, when you close them, open about 10000000 more pop-up’s. I use Pop-up Stopper from Lavasoft. This is not commercial for them because they have a free working Version you can D/L from their site. I use aggressive pop-up control that blocks ALL new Explorer windows from opening. You can turn it on/off just by double clicking on icon in taskbar and open desired link in a new window by holding space. Once you get used to it you can't live without it, trust me. You can find it on www.panicware.com .

Another great tool is for e-mails. I use Mailwasher, which is completely freeware, and I warmly recommend this to anyone. It enables you to get list of all mail you have on your mail server without actually downloading any of the stuff. You can see even the preview of the message (no images) from there to check if it’s a spam mail. Of course it has blacklist and friends list. It also checks e-mail addresses of all senders on Spam Cop black lists and similar sites to decide if its possible spam. The usage is very simple - you simply select the check box delete for all Messages you want to delete from server and *this is good* you can BOUNCE those Messages back (also checkbox). Bouncing means that sender receives authentic e-mail that says that your mail address is not valid (you can try this by sending e-mail to yourself and then bouncing it). Program will automatically select all Messages that were sent from blacklisted Messages (Spam Cop’s or yours blacklist) and all you need to do is press process. Once you have pressed process, the program will delete and bounce all the mail you have selected and open Outlook Express so you can get rest of the e-mails from server (note. he wont open OE if there is no more mail). All this reading, bouncing and deleting is done directly from the pop3 server. There are more features but I can't remember it now (ah yes, one of them is checking your mail every xx minutes).

This baby is so easy and useful to use that I find it hard to believe its FREEWARE. Also, there are some other benefits that this program introduces:
- Since you don’t actually download any of the mail with this program, you can check if this mail is possible worm/virus and safely delete it.
- You can see the size of mail/attachments and delete it from server without having to download some large not needed/useless e-mail file attachments.

The link to Mailwasher is www.mailwasher.net.

I hope you guys will find some of this info useful.

[ April 19, 2003, 00:57: Message edited by: Daynarr ]