First, some simple definitions.

Spam: Unsolicited email.
Spammer: Sender of unsolicited email.

Spam is every bit as unwelcome as circulars in your post box or telemarketers who call at meal times. Fortunately there are ways to decrease or eliminate the amount of spam you receive in your daily mail.

Why is spam bad?

• Theft of resources - The amount of time it takes to filter out unwanted email from legitimate email stops you doing other productive things.
• The receiver pays - You pay for receiving spam, through your online charges and time.
• You never asked for it - it is an invasion of your privacy.
• It's garbage.
• The offerings are most probably fraudulent or illegal.

General Tips

Here are some straightforward tips to help you overcome or prevent spam and viruses in your email.

• Be private. Don't give out your email address in the first place. In many instances if you are required to give your email address in order to receive something off a website, give an email address that you have set up specifically to receive junk.

• You can also set up a fake email address at such places as www.hotmail.com or www.yahoo.com. These email accounts are free.
• If you need to give your address, look for ways to opt out of receiving promotional mailings.
• Treat every email you preview as suspicious. Many harmless looking emails with attachments may contain viruses. Many people succumbed to the "I love you" email that contained a virus. Use MailWasher Pro to preview your emails before you download them to your PC.
• When you receive a forwarded email asking for help or money from someone, and in return you will have eternal good luck (or bad luck if you don't forward it), do not forward it on. It is likely to be a hoax and is a great way for spammers to cultivate email addresses. Many virus warning emails are hoaxes too.
• When forwarding emails to groups of people, send them via the BCC field. This shields their address from others. Ask others to send emails to you this way too.
• Use the filters function to filter out unwanted emails that do, or do not meet certain criteria - further info on how to use the filters properly is below.
• Keep your name off mailing lists, chat rooms and newsgroups by not giving out your correct address in the first place.
• If your email address is on a website, ask your web designer to transform it into a picture. Otherwise it is very easy for automated "robots" to come and cultivate your email address and put it onto a mailing list. But if it is displayed as a picture, then it won't be recognizable as an email address to a "robot".
• Many spam messages have instructions at the bottom of the message asking you to reply to the message if you want to be removed from their mailing list. Don't do this, as it will only confirm that your address is valid and active and you will most likely be hit with more spam. Use MailWasher Pro to bounce the message back to the spammer so it looks as though your address is not valid.
• Check the email address of the sender - do you recognize it? If not, then click on the header in MailWasher Pro and you will see a preview of the email in MailWasher Pro's preview pane.
• Watch out for fake headers. These are in the subject line and are commonly - "Dear Friend..." or "Here's the information you requested...".
• Never buy anything from a spammer's email, even if it is something you want, as it is likely to be fraudulent.
• You can complain to the spammers Internet Service Provider by sending an email to abuse@ [the domain in particular] or postmaster@ [the domain in particular].
• Don't reply to contests in your email or offers of free websites as it will most likely be a hoax.
• Don't submit your address to Opt-out or removal lists as these are a hoax and you will end up getting more spam.
• It is still advisable to have antivirus software installed on your computer. While you may be able to recognize an email with a strange attachment, a picture or word document may harbor a virus.
• Use MailWasher Pro to delete any unwanted emails directly off your Internet Service Providers server before you receive them.
• Use the Blacklist function in MailWasher Pro to instantly recognize previous spammers or to delete the message off the server instantly.
• Finally, one option that will get rid of the spam (for a while) is to change your email address. It may take some time to notify others of your new address, but at least you will not get spam.
• Set to automatically bounce blacklisted messages as soon as they are recognized by MailWasher Pro so you never have to see them.
• Add your own existing blacklist quickly by adding to the blacklist text file where the MailWasher Pro program file resides.
• MailWasher Pro works very well if you have a permanent connection to the Internet. You can just set MailWasher Pro to check for new mail automatically every ten minutes or so.
• If you have any questions, or if you would like to offer feedback, fill in the contact form at:
  www.mailwasher.net/sendmail.php.

MailWasher Tips

Using Filters

If you want to block out a whole string of words, instead of trying to write a filter for each word, user regular expressions instead. Regular expressions are powerful tools that make writing filters easier.

Let's say you wanted to be notified of the following words in an email:
free, money, casino, deal, credit and $.
Instead of writing six separate filters - regular expressions let you put them on one line, like this:

"The body" "contains RegExpr" free|money|casino|deal|credit|$|

This will filter out any emails with these words.

Using the Learning feature

MailWasher Pro's Learning function uses a special filtering technique for identifying incoming spam. To identify spam, MailWasher Pro's filter looks at the entire context of an email, not just the heading and subject line. It then compares the content of messages that are known to be spam with messages that are known to be legitimate, in order to build up a database of words that is used to predict or identify the probability that a future email is spam or not. The filter learns to identify new spam the more it analyzes incoming messages and trains itself to identify new patterns of spam!

In the MailWasher Pro message table, either select the spam checkbox (trashcan) or the Legitimate checkbox (envelope) in the Learning column, next to the message(s) that you want to teach MailWasher Pro to be able to recognize in your future mail. After only a few days of training, MailWasher Pro will be automatically catching most of your junkmail itself!

Spam Blacklists

MailWasher Pro uses an "Origin of Spam" function so you can check the origin of an email against third-party DNS spam Blacklist Servers.

A DNS spam Blacklist Server is a database of known Internet addresses (or IP's) used by persons or companies who are either sending spam, or who are known in some way to support spammers. For example, having open mail relays or hosting websites and distributing marketing spamming software. MailWasher Pro comes with a well known DNS spam Blacklist Server already implemented, this being Spamhaus.org and you can add more if you wish.

My Friends List

If you find that you get a lot of emails and most of them are junk, here's a quick way to sort through them.

One way to deal with a whole lot of email is to change the Friends List in this way:
In the My Friends List options tab (Tools > Spam Tools > My Friends List), untick Display the email under Action, so people in your Friends List won't be shown. This allows you to go through your list very quickly and select a block of emails by pressing [Shift] and clicking on the messages, then right click to mark them for Deletion. Then you can go through what is left and unmark those from friends. After a while you will have lots of people in My Friends List (which won't be shown) and all the junk shows up which can be marked for Deletion by right clicking and selecting Mark all for Deletion. You can then click View > Show hidden emails to see what your friends have sent you, or simply download them.

Attachments

Here's how to make MailWasher Pro recognize an attachment. (This might be a bit complicated for some users.)

Here is the header of an email with an attachment:

X-Mozilla-Status: 9001
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000
Message-ID: <3C170241.EB2F627B@bobbuilder.com>
Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2004 20:07:45 +1300
From: Bob Builder <Bob@bobbuilder.com>
X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.73 [en] (Windows NT 5.0;U)
X-Accept-Language: en
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: Nick Bolton <nick.bolton@company.com>
Subject: 1.30
References: <011f01c17eef$74c16740$ee4c56d2@carolyn>
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary="-----------1E35701F7A8E081B531FC710"
---------------------------------------

The second to last line is:
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;

This line is in emails which have files(s) attached to them.

So, a simple filter to determine if there is an attachment would be to see if the string multipart/mixed is anywhere in the header - you don't want to search for Content-Type: multipart/mixed; as that won't match a malformed header like Content-Type:multipart/mixed;

To match it properly you could search the header with a regular expression instead, eg
Content-Type:\s*multipart/mixed;

So your filter would read as follows:

"The entire header" "Contains RegExpr" Content-Type:\s*multipart/mixed;

However, the name and type of attachments are specified in the body, eg

-----------1E35701F7A8E081B531FC710
Content-Type: application/octet-stream;
name="MailWasher.exe"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: attachment;
filename="MailWasher.exe"

and this is the part that the built-in MailWasher® Pro regular expression is checking for. By default, MailWasher® Pro only previews the first twenty lines of a message (for speed), so it may not pick up attachments at the bottom of lots of line of text. Viruses are a bit different, in that they usually do not contain much text, if any at all. But you can change how many lines MailWasher® Pro automatically previews (speed vs security) using the "spam throttle" (Tools > Options > General).

Bounced Email

If you own your own domain name, this will be useful.

If you get bounced emails returned to you, then read on...

When MailWasher Pro sends a bounce email, it sends it via the postmaster of your Internet Service Provider so it looks exactly like it is a genuine bounced email. If the message that you are trying to bounce has a false return address then you will receive a non deliverable bounced email which will further clutter your inbox - this is because you own your own domain and all the mail is fed into that domain. This doesn't happen if you have an address from an Internet Service Provider - they get the non deliverable bounced email back to their inbox.

To stop the non deliverable emails coming back into your inbox, enter the address
MAILER-DAEMON@mydomain.com
into your Blacklist and set it to auto-delete. (Where mydomain.com is actually the domain you own.)

Your EmailProgram

How to get your email program to check automatically when it starts.

If you have your email program set to not check mail at all (unless specified by you), then after you have finished processing mail with MailWasher Pro, it will open up your email program, but will not check mail for you until you press the Receive button yourself.

To get around this, and have your email program automatically check mail when it is opened (but not at other times), set the Check for new mail every xx minutes to a very high number, say 999. This will prevent your email program checking while it is up, but WILL permit it to check when initially started.

Shortcut Keys

You can use keys instead of the mouse to navigate within MailWasher® Pro:

Firewalls

Get a personal firewall.
These will notify you if any programs on your computer try to contact an external address without you knowing.

Have a look at:

ZoneAlarm: www.zonelabs.com
Look 'n' Stop: www.looknstop.com

Fight Spam

Follow this link if you would like to know more about fighting spam:

www.cauce.org