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MailWasher Pro Review
| Reviewer: | Stephen Qualtrough |
| Developer: | Firetrust |
| Ranked: | 1st - Best buy |
| Overall rating: | |
| Price: | |
| Purchase: |
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Review summary
Good points
Compatible with all major e-mail clients
Works with POP3 & IMAP protocols
Spam detection improves over time
Features a friends list/whitelisting that protects legitimate messages from spam filter
Bad points
No phone-based support offered
Our verdict
This is easily one of the best email spam filters on the market. Mailwasher Pro provides powerful, effective filtering capabilities that work with all types of e-mail clients and services.
Full review
Spam, Spam, Spam. For most people, spam is a major frustration. Improvements have been made, but the cyberpests continue to invent new ways to get unwanted emails into your inbox. Firetrust, a software company that focuses on e-mail security, attempts to tackle this problem with MailWasher Pro. Since we hate spam just as much as the average computer user, we were quite eager to see how MailWasher came out in the wash.
Setup
Filetrust offers two different versions of MailWasher Pro. One of these offerings, an older version of MailWasher Pro, has lower system requirements; it is suitable for older systems. The version that we chose to install and review, MailWasher Pro, offers more features, but it also has higher system requirements. Filetrust suggests that systems running the version of MailWasher Pro have at least 1GB of memory installed.
On our new test laptop, with Windows 10 and 8GB of memory, MailWasher Pro installed in a little under a minute. With the default installation settings selected, minimal input was required, and we did not encounter any issues.
Compatibility
MailWasher Pro is fully compatible with all e-mail clients, including Thunderbird, Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail, and more. It supports POP3 and IMAP protocols, and it even works with web-based e-mail services, such as Outlook.com and Gmail.
Detection
Starting out, MailWasher Pro detected a fair share of the spam in our inbox. As we used MailWasher more, its spam-detection capabilities continued to improve, which is due to its use of a Bayesian filter. By marking certain e-mail messages as spam, users train this filter to detect spam more effectively in the future. For example, once MailWasher's Bayesian filter learns that most messages containing the word “Drugs” are spam, it will automatically classify e-mails that use this word excessively as spam in the future.
In addition to its Bayesian filter, MailWasher features a black list and a friends list. These lists make it easy to block messages from certain senders while ensuring that messages from non-spam sources always come through.
Effectiveness
Importantly, when detecting spam, MailWasher Pro is very effective. While it may need users to manually select some spam messages in the beginning, its spam-detection capabilities improve with each manual selection. After just a few sessions, MailWasher was already detecting spam correctly nearly 90% of the time. As we continue to use this software, we have no doubt that its effectiveness will continue to improve.
System performance
Unsurprisingly on a laptop that easily met Firetrust's recommended hardware specifications, MailWasher Pro performed very well. Navigating through its menus was quick and painless. Once we clicked the “Check Mail” button, MailWasher managed to pull in e-mail messages even faster than Thunderbird, the e-mail client used on our test system. The process of deleting spam messages was also quick and painless; completing in just a few seconds.
Features
Mail preview – Users can view the content of all e-mails in plain text. This makes it quick, easy, and safe to browse through all e-mails without downloading and opening them in an e-mail client.
Multilingual support – MailWasher Pro supports 12 different languages: English, German, French, French Canadian, Dutch, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Swedish, Russian, Czech, and Japanese.
Bounce – This feature allows users to bounce spam messages back to senders. When an e-mail message is bounced back to the sender, it appears as if the e-mail address no longer exists.
Ease of use
Getting started with MailWasher Pro is a breeze. Not only does it automatically import settings from e-mail clients, it imports contact lists as well. By obtaining this information automatically, MailWasher is ready to start detecting spam immediately. For the most part, it automatically determines which e-mail messages are spam. Spam messages are marked with a thumbs-down icon, but they can easily be unmarked with a single click. Spam messages are deleted once users click the “Wash Mail” button. Also, after clicking this button, non-spam messages are automatically downloaded by users' e-mail clients.
Help & support
Firetrust's website features a pretty decent support section. MailWasher Pro customers have access to an FAQ page and an active forum. Firetrust also provides technical support to customers through e-mail, but they do not offer support via telephone. For a simple, straightforward program, Firetrust's support options will be more than adequate for most users.
Overall
MailWasher Pro is a highly effective anti-spam filter; it is also easy to use. Not only does it work with all e-mail clients, it requires very minimal configuration. We recommend MailWasher to anyone looking for a tool that can minimize spam easily.
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