in message
For an advanced user the Poptray looks the most easiest to use but
you need to do scripts to allow msn, hotmail or aol. Someone like
myself would have no problem figuring it all out.
Scripts? You mean plug-ins? The user doesn't have to code those.
Since Hotmail uses WebDAV as the scripting language to communicate
with their mail host, that's probably what the Hotmail plug-in uses.
They just download them and install into PopTray. However, unless the
user has a paid account then they aren't going to connect to their
freebie Hotmail account, anyway. Microsoft discontinued WebDAV access
to freebie Hotmail accounts in November 2004. Looks like what you
call scripts are actually plug-ins
(
http://www.poptray.org/plugins.php). If you want, yes, you could
write up your own plug-in for PopTray. Normal users would just
install the plug-ins that a developer already provided to them.
The spampal doesn't support any of these and it has bad problems
working with Vista, and on its specs Vista is not even listed.
There is nothing specific to Vista that would make SpamPal not run on
that OS platform. SpamPal is still a 32-bit program and there is
absolutely no need to port it to 64-bit. 32-bit programs still run
under Vista even if on a 64-bit hardware platform. I found nothing of
Vista was needed by me, especially since they dumped the WinFS
databased file system. A new GUI and more fluffware does not make a
new OS but Microsoft needed to make enough changes to start generating
revenue since the user market for Windows XP was pretty flat (i.e.,
already flooded). So what error did you get when you tried SpamPal on
Windows Vista? 32-bit programs should run under Vista.
When I Googled on "+spampal +vista", I see articles like
http://www.msfn.org/articles.php?action=show&id=34 which shows the
author had no problem running SpamPal on Windows Vista. So what are
these problems with SpamPal on Windows Vista to which you allude?
I also searched the PopTray forums on "vista" (and ignored those for
*beta* versions of Windows Vista). 13 posts. Some simply required a
new installation of PopTray due to problems when migrating to Windows
Vista from a prior version of Windows (which I never do because it
pollutes the new Windows version and instead I always do a new and
fresh OS install). Some were posted by users that don't know how to
use Vista (or any NT-based version of Windows along with user
accounts). Some mention "Vista" but are not reporting a problem but
discussing operating systems, Office on Vista, or general questions
about running PopTray on Vista. Another was to report a bug in
PopTray in parsing Subject headers with "=?<encoding>" in the header
but that's not a Vista-specific problem but a problem with PopTray
parsing headers that specify the encoding used. Other than "will it
work", "how to make it work", or general questions, none of the posts
were to report that PopTray would not function under Windows Vista.
Magic Mail Monitor is hosted at sourceforge.net (lots of free and good
stuff there). It is a crappy forum interface which provides no
searching so I couldn't go hunt on how many posts mentioned "vista".
There do seem to be some problems with Magic under Vista. Magic was
an adopted program. The original author abandoned it and another
developer grabbed it. It gets rarely updated and mostly just squats
over at Sourceforge. PopTray gets updated much more often. If I ever
move to Vista (unlikely) and Magic has problems then I'd move to
PopTray. There is just 1 post in their forum about Magic under
Windows Vista but then it isn't a very active forum, either.
SpamPal forums search on "vista" returned 3 hits. In PopTray's
forums, 13 hits. Firetrust doesn't even have a link to a forum where
users can discuss problems with their Mailwasher product! I found a
Firetrust forum over at castlecops.com but then Firetrust, who is
generating revenue with Mailwasher Pro, isn't the one forking over the
costs to operate the forum. Found 71 hits there on "vista". So there
is more bitching or questioning going on for Mailwasher than there is
for SpamPal or PopTray.
Since I mostly deal with beginner users and mailwasher pro is the
easiet to use and set up, I still would recommend it to this type of
group even though you have to pay for it to get all the features.
Does the free version of Mailwasher still limit itself to supporting
just one e-mail account? Do your "users" only have a single e-mail
account?
Does Mailwasher have an option during install to disable its bounce
"feature"? Bogus bounces sent at the client end can get the user
blacklisted for misdirected backscatter. When bouncing against spam
e-mails, the spammer obviously doesn't use their own e-mail address so
those Mailwasher-generated bounces afflict innocents that never sent
the spam but whose e-mail address the spammer usurped. Only *during*
the mail session between SMTP servers is the sender truly known and
wherein the spam should get rejected as undeliverable. After the mail
session, a mail server or user sending a *new* and disconnected e-mail
as a bounce can only rely on the return-path headers in the received
e-mail, and spammers lie. When I get misdirected bounces from idiots
that think bouncing is effective, I report their backscatter as the
spam it is (since obviously *I* did not solicit their misdirected
bounce and the idiot is bouncing as fast as he gets spam). Make sure
bouncing is not enabled in Mailwasher and establish an e-mail policy
that it never gets enabled (unless Mailwasher has a install-time
selection or obeys domain policies to disable its bounce feature).
Bouncing is not a buried option within Mailwasher. It is right there
as a tab when the user configures the accounts defined within
Mailwasher.
Rather than working *with* your e-mail program, Mailwasher operates
separately. SpamPal merely tags the suspect mails and you define
rules in your e-mail program to decide what to do with these tagged
mails. SpamPal doesn't do anything on your mails other than possible
tag them. Those mails still get delivered to your e-mail client where
you decide how to handle them. Mailwashwer operates independently of
your e-mail program. It is not a proxy as is SpamPal. It is a mail
monitor just like Magic Mail Monitor and PopTray. The problem is
synchronization. An e-mail monitor will poll an account at which time
it can exercise its rules; however, your e-mail client will do its own
poll separately of an e-mail monitor which means there could be spam
that got into your mailbox and to your e-mail client before your
e-mail monitor did its poll to get rid of that spam (or tag it). With
SpamPal, the same tagging is applied whether the poll was from your
e-mail program or your e-mail monitor, so your e-mail program will
still know if a mail is spam or not. Your e-mail program doesn't go
through Mailwasher as it does with SpamPal.
I also noticed for Vista for Poptray you have to set up a script to
make it work for the standard user. Mailwasher pro doesn't have
this problem at all. It installs with no problems in Vista in the
administrator user and all standard users.
I went into the forums of both software and both have problems with
vista, if you check the mailwasher forums hardly any had problems
setting it up in vista.
I went to the SpamPal forums and search on "vista" in their Support
forum and an info post
(
http://www.spampalforums.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=8103&highlight=vista)
which was to ask about 64-bit support for SpamPal (which is just plain
stupid as there would be absolutely no improvement in performance by
porting from 32-bit to 64-bit), one saying the transparent proxy mode
(which I don't use) worked okay on Vista, and another that had nothing
to do with Windows Vista (the poster said "Hasta las vista"). No
SpamPal users have yet posted about problems *running* SpamPal on
Windows Vista.
I don't know about problems with PopTray under Windows Vista. I have
briefly looked at that product as a substitute for Magic Mail Monitor.
However, since I decided to stick with Magic then I don't have the
background to rebute any claims against PopTray. Magic is yet another
32-bit application so it should run fine under Windows Vista. Yet
both Magic and PopTray are merely e-mail monitors that include rule
support and I use them only to clean out my mailbox *before* my e-mail
client has to deal with the spam. I don't need to use e-mail monitors
at all, even one like Mailwasher, and could let my e-mail client
handle them the same way as I would have the e-mail monitor handle
them. SpamPal is doing the detecting. Whether I have an e-mail
program or e-mail monitor handle them is my choice, and using an
e-mail monitor is actually superfluous - except I find them to be more
stable than Outlook (the e-mail monitor keeps running okay but
Outlook, when connecting to something other than Exchange, sometimes
stop functioning properly).
Sometimes Free is not necessarily better depending on what type the
user is who is using it.
And sometimes freeware surpasses payware. If I get more with a free
product than for a paid product, why would I pay to get less?
The one lacking feature of SpamPal: it does not support SSL
connections to mail hosts. So, for example, you cannot use it alone
for connecting to Gmail which demands the use of SSL. To get around
that deficiency, use the sTunnel proxy to support SSL connects: your
client connects to SpamPal which connects through sTunnel (if SSL is
wanted for the account) which then connects to the mail host using
SSL. I don't know why SpamPal has not yet included SSL support rather
than make users setup sTunnel. Mailwasher does support SSL
connections.
SpamPal supports both POP3 and IMAP connects. Mailwasher Free only
supports POP3. Not until you *PAY* to get the Pro version do you get
support for IMAP, Hotmail, and AOL (don't know why they list AOL
separately since they now use IMAP). Besides the limit of 1 account
in Mailwasher Free, you get stuck with bannerware prodding you to buy
their paid Pro version. Once you buy their Pro version, do you ever
have to pay yearly subscriptions as is the norm for anti-virus
software? Do you ever have to pay for upgrades to their next major
version?
Mailwasher uses DNSBLs (DNS blacklists) but is only available in the
paid Pro version. SpamPal includes blacklists, lets you select which
ones to use (since they have different purposes and behavior), and
SpamPal is free.
Mailwasher includes a Bayes filter - but again only in the *paid* Pro
version, not in their free version. SpamPal includes a Bayesian
plug-in, too, but SpamPal is free. Also, many spammers attempt to
poison Bayes databases by including paragraphs of non-spammy words
hoping the Bayes filter picks some of its keywords from that
non-spammy section of the e-mail. The SpamPal Bayesian filter has an
expiration to eliminate words that haven't been used in N days; i.e.,
you can define the "floor" for the database or expire out the noise to
prevent poisoning. Rarely have I seen a similar feature in other
Bayesian filters. Sure, expiry is perhaps a function in several Bayes
filters but rare few let the user configure that setting.
Mailwasher (free and Pro) has white- and blacklists. So does SpamPal
(always free). SpamPal also has an automated whitelist that will add
senders from which you receive repeated non-spam tagged e-mails. So,
for example, in my setup, I auto-whitelist senders that send me
non-spam e-mails on 12 *separate* days. I upped the day count because
there are rare few users that send me e-mails often enough that I want
to *automatically* whitelist them. Most known good senders will be
either whitelisted in SpamPal or I simply use a rule in Outlook to
accept e-mails from anyone in my Contacts folder.
SpamPal has its RegEx plug-in to let you use regular expressions to
more accurately and more potently define string criteria (and anywhere
in the e-mail, including all headers). Mailwasher can search the body
and through all headers, too, but its search criteria is very
simplistic and similar to the lowly string searches avaible in Outlook
Express or Thunderbird. So far, and although I have RegEx installed,
I haven't needed to use it because the other spam detection methods
have been highly successfully. There is the RubyExec plug-in to let
you use that scripting to define spam criteria but, again, I haven't
need to go that far to filter out the spam crap.
Mailwasher includes an option to report spam to SpamCop (who sends out
the abuse reports and updates their blacklist) but only in the paid
Pro version. You can get the OLSpamCop plug-in for Outlook to do the
same thing. Or just put a shortcut to
http://www.spamcop.net/ in your
Windows taskbar (which is what I do). Mailwasher is probably easier
in that you don't have to install a plug-in or go to a web page to
then paste in the spam mail to report it. However, since Mailwasher
runs as an e-mail monitor rather than a proxy used by your e-mail
program, it is entirely possible that your e-mail program does its own
mail poll and gets the spam in it so that mail won't be available to
Mailwasher on its next poll so now how are you going to report that
spam? Also, SpamCop has 2 methods of reporting spam: you paste it in
their webform and answer the prompts there, or you send them the spam
mail and then they send you back a confirmation e-mail (which takes
you to their second webform page to do the confirmations). So I'm not
sure how much ease-of-use is added by the SpamCop option within
Mailwasher Pro.
Use a plug-in, SpamPal can detect e-mails that originate from
dynamically IP addressed hosts using its MXblocking plug-in. This
eliminates getting spam from infected users that have trojan mailers
running on their hosts. Mail servers have static IP addresses. The
vast majority of users have dynamic IP addresses. Again, SpamPal
merely tags the suspect mails and it is up to YOU to decide using
rules as to what to do with them. You could [permanently] delete
those dynamic IP sourced e-mails, or you could move them into the Junk
folder, or you could colorize them. Your choice.
Because of the possibility of false positives, I use the UserLogfile
plug-in for SpamPal. This saves a plain-text version of every e-mail
that SpamPal has tagged as suspect. If I find that my rules in my
e-mail program deleted the message (or the e-mail monitor deleted it
from the mail host), I could recover a text version from where the
UserLogfile saved a copy. I will admit there is one function missing
from this plug-in and that is to expire saved text-only versions of
these suspect mails from where they are stored. After awhile, old
copies are not required. So I wrote a batch file to expire (delete)
them after a specified number of days which I put into Task Scheduler
to run once per week. I gave the plug-in author my batch file (but
I've modified it since then) to provide a copy at his web site so it
is available with the plug-in.
In SpamPal, you can tag e-mails that come from certain countries. I
don't converse with folks from Brazil, Argentina, China, Thailand, and
so forth. Any e-mails from there are always spam to me. I'm in the
USA and currently I tag (not block) e-mails that come from China,
Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Argentina,
Brazil, Nigeria, and Turkey. They do include the USA if you are
outside there and don't e-mail with anyone there. Does Mailwasher,
even the Pro version, have a country-specific blacklist and where the
user can choose which countries to block any e-mails originating from
there?
In SpamPal, and besides the public DNSBLs, I can add my own DNSBL (IP
blacklist). I haven't had a need yet to do so, but some folks
maintain their own blacklist and would want to include it in their
anti-spam solution. Mailwasher doesn't let you pick which blacklists
get used. I'm not sure which blacklists Mailwasher Pro uses (the free
version doesn't use any of them). Maybe they only use SpamCop. I use
SpamCop but I also use SpamHaus SBL+XBL (which includes blitzed.org),
ORDB, and NJABL. I no longer use SORBS because they don't expire
entries fast enough (I found out some don't get removed until a manual
purge after 3 months, or more, which is ridiculous since much spam
comes from dynamic IP addressed sources). I definitely don't use
SPEWS (or its latest UCEPROTECT incarnation after SPEWS went dead)
because they don't identify spam sources but rather rate the spamming
history (i.e., spamminess) of a domain. Of those that I do use,
SpamCop is actually considered the most aggressive blacklister but I
haven't had a problem with them yet. Besides, SpamHaus has almost
always identified the same spam as SpamCop (and gets used first in
SpamPal).
SpamPal has an HTMLModify plug-in that attempts to rate HTML-formatted
e-mails based on what HTML code they use. It's okay but I had to tone
it down a lot to prevent false positives. I eventually deleted this
plug-in. If you have an e-mail client that does not yet have the
option to read in plain-text only mode (and that's what you want to
use) then this plug-in can strip out the HTML and deliver a plain-text
version.
There is a P2P plug-in for SpamPal. I've never used it. From what I
gather, it connects to a server to use a database where a community
has voted on whether e-mails where spam or not. This is similar to
Cloudmark's SpamNet product (which is now payware after they yanked
away their freeware version) where users vote on spam. Rather than
just rely on blacklists, Bayes filters, rules, and other such
programmatic solutions, the community method relies on humans doing
the deciding. Yes, humans can probably identify spam better than do
algorithms but humans also make mistakes - and many users classify all
unwanted e-mails as spam (i.e., they don't have a clue what is the
correct definition of UBE/UCE).
