SpamButcher - Behind the Cleaver

It certainly succeeded in blocking a lot of spam - but it also picked up a bunch of wanted email. Any message with remotely vulgar or money oriented content would be killed. I had messages from job recruiters and friends accidentally filtered. I tried tweaking the spam filters, but it didn't help much.

The entire idea behind the product is to include everything a spammer might possibly put in an e-mail - but nothing a friend or co-worker might. This works if 90% of spam mentions viagra - but your friends never do. Once the spammers caught on to this it was easy to work around (ie using V1AGR@).

Every time spammers changed their tactics - the product required updating. This wasn't such a big deal until they started charging for it. (Don't get suckered into thinking SpamKiller is really a $29.95 product - it's no different than purchasing a cell-phone for $19.95).

I put up with it for a few months before giving up. I then moved on to Mailwasher.

Mailwasher isn't really an anti-spam program - it's more of in the category of spam email management utilities. It has some spam detection code - but not much. The basic premise is that your read your emails subject lines before downloading them from your server - and then remove any unwanted messages manually .

This saves on bandwidth and local disk space - but your still ultimately reviewing every email manually. It doesn't perform any email filtering on its own. Bandwidth and space are cheap - but my time isn't. Any real solution to my spam problem needed to save me time.

Mailwasher got ditched after a few days.

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