MailWasher PRO, Spam Filter and Spam Reporting Tool

If you are one of those people who often report spam to anti-spam organisations like SpamCop, KnuJon and Cyber Top Cops, I bet you always wished you had a tool that can combat spam and report it to anti-spam organisations at the same time. Well, you can stop wishing because such a tool has been available for quite some time now and it is called MailWasher PRO. In this article I will give step by step instructions on how to use MailWasher and how to configure it so that you can filter and report spam more efficiently.

MailWasher has quite a unique approach to spam filtering, by getting rid of your spam before you download it with your e-mail client. This saves bandwidth and the time of scanning through the multitude of junk in your inbox to find your good e-mails. Most e-mail clients already have a built-in spam filter (like Mozilla Thunderbird and Microsoft Outlook), but MailWasher does not attempt to replace these built-in spam filters, but rather complement them. You should see MailWasher as your first line of defence against spam and your e-mail client's built-in spam filter as a backup for the spam that got past MailWasher.

Where do I get MailWasher? Visit Firetrust.com and download the 30 day trial version of MailWasher PRO. There is also a free version available, but you can only use it with one e-mail account, you won't have a recycle bin for your deleted e-mails and the preview pane is very limited. If these limitations do not bother you, I recommend you download the free version.

Now how does MailWasher work? It is really simple, you open MailWasher before opening your e-mail client, let MailWasher check your e-mails, tell MailWasher which ones are spam and which ones are good and finally, click on the Wash Mail button and let MailWasher do the rest. After “washing” your e-mails, open your e-mail client and download your e-mails from your spam-free e-mail account.

So how exactly do you tell MailWasher which e-mails are good and which ones are bad? Well, each e-mail has a thumbs-up and a thumbs-down icon next to it. If you click the thumbs-up icon, MailWasher will identify the e-mail as good mail and if you click the thumbs-down icon, MailWasher will identify the e-mail as spam. Over time, MailWasher will get better at classifying your e-mails correctly, so you won't have to train MailWasher all the time. If you are not following what I am saying, watch the 60 second MailWasher PRO, quick start video.

One way of improving MailWasher without doing any manual training, is by setting up custom filters under the Spam Tool Settings. To do this follow these steps:

1. Click on Settings.
2. Click on Spam Tools.
3. Click on Filters.
4. Click on Add Filter.
5. Give your filter a name, for example avast! Spam Filter, you may leave the Description field empty.
6. Make sure Filter Type, is set to Spam and that the sentence under Rules reads: Apply filter to e-mails that match Any of the following rules.
7. Click on Add Rule.
8. Change Entire message to 'Subject'.
9. Enter the text *** SPAM *** in the text input box.
10. Click on the Save button at the bottom of the window.

This filter will work great with the anti-spam component of avast! Internet Security. avast! also uses the tag *** PHISHING *** for phishing e-mails, so you can add a second rule by repeating steps 7 – 9 above, and adding the text *** PHISHING *** instead of *** SPAM ***. This should work with any spam filter that modifies the Subject of identified spam e-mails, you just need to change the text, specified in step 8, to the appropriate tag added by your spam filter. For example Kaspersky Internet Security adds the text [!!Spam] to the subject line when it identifies an e-mail as spam, so if you are using Kaspersky Internet Security, replace *** SPAM *** in step 9, with [!!Spam].

This does not necessarily have to correspond to a specific spam tag added by a spam filter, you can also add filters for words found in the subject line, commonly associated with spam, for example: Enlargement, Supplement, Pharmacy, Congratulations, etc. You can even add a couple of other words, that's not appropriate for me to mention in this article, but I think you know what I mean. This will keep vulgar and inappropriate e-mails out of your mailbox and MailWasher will mark them as spam automatically. The possibilities with these custom filters are endless.

The other great thing about MailWasher is its Spam Reporting Tool. That's right you can report spam to SpamCop, KnuJon and Cyber Top Cops all at once. To set up a spam reporting service, follow these steps:

1. Click on Settings.
2. Click on Spam Tools.
3. Click on Spam Reporting.
4. The SpamCop service will already be created, so double-click it to open its settings.
5. Replace the text in the Email to field with your own SpamCop reporting e-mail address. It should be in the format submit.SPAMCOPID@spam.spamcop.net. Replace SPAMCOPID with your unique SpamCop ID.
6. Choose the e-mail account through which MailWasher must send the report.
7. Choose the colour of the report service. This is the colour of the icon that will appear next to the e-mail under the Reporting column.
8. Choose a letter of the alphabet to identify the spam reporting service easily. The letter 's' will already be assigned to the SpamCop Service.
9. Click on the Save button at the bottom of the window.
10. Click on Add Service.
11. Type Cyber Top Cops next to Service name.
12. Type spam@cybertopcops.com next to the Email to field.
13. Leave Email content blank.
14. Repeat steps 6 – 9. Choose the letter 'c' in step 8.
15. Repeat step 10 – 14. Choose the letter 'k' in step 8. Instead of Cyber Top Cops in step 11, type KnuJon and instead of spam@cybertopcops.com in step 12, type KNUJON@COLDRAIN.NET or your unique KnuJon reporting e-mail address.

Now you are properly equipped for the battle against spam, without breaking a sweat. All you need to do now is to mark the appropriate spam reporting services before clicking on Wash Mail. To do this go back to your Inbox in MailWasher, right-click on the column bar with the different headings and select Reporting from the list. When you mark an e-mail as spam, also click on the reporting service icons under the Reporting column. If you followed my instructions correctly you will have 3 icons next to each spam e-mail, where each icon correspond to the colour and letter your chose in steps 7 and 8 above.

About the Author
Coenraad is webmaster and founder of Cyber Top Cops, leaders in Internet security, analysers of security software and raising awareness about spam and malicious software.

The Best Internet Security

What is the best Internet security suite in the world? I've reviewed quite a number of Internet security suites and all of them have pros and cons, but what if we were able to take all the good features of each Internet security suite and build the perfect Internet security suite of all time? It is not completely impossible, because most Internet security suites have stand alone versions of their anti-malware and firewall components and some even have a stand alone version of their spam filter. Right, so what do you really need for an Internet security suite?

First of all you need a malware scanner and a resident anti-malware shield to protect your computer from malware attacks. Secondly you need a good firewall to control inbound and outbound traffic over the networks you connect to. Finally you need a good spam filter to protect you from e-mail fraud and other types of unsolicited bulk e-mails. I believe these are the most important components of a good Internet security suite. These days Internet security suites contain all kinds of extra features like parental control tools, anti-phishing tools, identity theft protection, special protection for browsers, sandboxing tools to isolate suspicious applications, ad blockers and more.

I have discovered a combination of 3 specific security applications that will protect you against malware, hackers and spammers. I chose these applications because they provide the highest level of protection without affecting the performance of your computer too much.

avast! Pro Antivirus

I will start with malware protection. avast! has the best malware detection rate of all the malware scanners I've reviewed so far. Apart from its good detection rate, it also has an impressive resident shield (or rather several resident shields). You get the File System Shield, Mail Shield (scans your e-mails for malware), Web Shield (protects you against online threats while browsing the Internet), P2P Shield (protection against treats on P2P networks), IM (Instant Messenger) Shield, Network Shield (not a firewall, but adds an additional layer of protection over your network traffic), Script Shield and the Behaviour Shield (heuristic scanner). Apart from these shields, it also provides additional protection through its Auto Sandbox (allows you to run suspicious programs without harming your system), SafeZone (a special secure desktop environment to conduct online transactions safely), Browser Protection (a special web reputation plugin and the ability to run your browser sandboxed), Remote Assistance (enables you to receive technical assistance from other avast! users, remotely) and Site Blocking features.

I guess it is clear from all the shields it has to offer, avast! Pro Antivirus can protect your computer against most threats on its own, but no security suite is complete without a good spam filter and firewall.

SPAMfighter PRO

Some people feel that a spam filter is unnecessary, but I believe a spam filter just adds another useful level of protection to your computer security. You need a spam filter to cut out all those unsolicited scam, malware, porn and enhancement product e-mails, just to name a few. Why waste your time filtering through hundreds of useless e-mails and walk the risk of being scammed or infected by malware? You might argue that the malware scanner should protect you against malware, but if the malware can't even reach your computer, there is even less risk of being infected.

Another big problem these days, is porn and indecent content being distributed and actually forced down the throats of spam victims. You don't want your children to be exposed to these e-mails and a spam filter will not necessarily eliminate the risk of exposure completely, but it will certainly lower it to an acceptable level.

SPAMfighter PRO is a unique community-based spam filter. When I say community-based, I mean that the strength of SPAMfighter lies in the amount of spam reported by SPAMfighter users worldwide. One may argue that a system like this can easily be abused. Yes, maybe, but it has been fighting the spam battle for quite some time now and is very good at identifying spam and leaving your good mail alone. When I reviewed SPAMfighter it did not flag a single good mail as spam and only a handful of junk e-mails were not identified as spam.

One of the main reasons why I like SPAMfighter so much is it compatibility with most popular e-mail clients. Many spam filters tend to work with Microsoft Outlook only, so if they are not compatible with your non-Microsoft e-mail client, they can't do the job at all, no matter how good they are at filtering spam.

Outpost Firewall Pro

These days you can't use the Internet without a proper firewall, providing adequate two-way protection for your computer. Most people think a firewall only needs to protect you from hackers trying to break into your computer, but you walk a greater risk of having sensitive information leaked from your computer to a remote location, than someone trying to gain access to it from a remote location. So you also need something to monitor your outbound traffic as well.

There is not a single personal firewall solution that can beat the level of network security and effectiveness provided by Agnitum's Outpost Firewall Pro. You know a firewall is good when companies like AVG Technologies, Lavasoft and Sophos use Agnitum's firewall technology in their own products. This is not your standard firewall, Outpost Firewall Pro comes with several additional features like Anti-Leak, System Guard, Application Guard, File & Folder Lock, Anti-Spyware scanner, Ads and Sites Blocker and ID Block. You can read more about these features in our latest review of Outpost Firewall Pro. Performance is a big issue to me, because I believe your security software should never handicap your productivity on your computer. The latest version of this firewall (version 7.5.3, also known as the Performance Edition), has been enhanced quite a lot in terms of performance.

Firewalls tend to annoy users with endless prompts and warnings, but Outpost Firewall Pro works in special Auto-Learn mode for a while. During this learning period it suppresses all those annoying prompts while learning more about the programs you often use and the network connections you normally make from your computer. It is not completely prompt-less during this period and you will still be warned about serious attacks and unauthorised connections being made to and from your computer.

What I really like about Outpost Firewall Pro is that it is much more “intelligent” than most firewalls and only bothers the user when there are some serious decisions to be made, decisions that a firewall should not be allowed to make on its own.

The only drawback about this firewall is that it may be a bit too advanced for novice users, but only when it comes to customizing the firewall to suit your needs. Because of its “intelligence” it will make the right choices during the setup process and most of the settings should work out of the box, so novice users won't have to worry about changing any settings to make the firewall work. If you are a novice user, I suggest you install avast! Pro Antivirus and SPAMfighter PRO before installing Outpost Firewall Pro, just to make your life a little bit easier.

Conclusion

avast! Pro Antivirus, SPAMfighter PRO and Outpost Firewall Pro are exceptional security programs, each in their own right. Running them side by side, gives you an edge over malware, spam and hackers.

There are basically only two disadvantages of this setup. Firstly, you can't manage these applications from a centralised location, like with an integrated Internet security suite, so you have to manage and configure them individually. One may argue that the Windows 7 security centre gives you a birds eye view over the status of all your security applications and all three applications have an auto update feature, so is it really such a big deal if you have to manage each one separately, because how much management and configuration do you have to do by hand anyway? It is probably not such a big deal, but I know some people will still prefer to have all these components bundled into one integrated security suite.

The second disadvantage of this setup is cost. It the time of writing this article, avast! Pro Antivirus will cost you $39.99, SPAMfighter PRO will cost you $19.97 and Outpost Firewall Pro will cost you $29. That is a total of $88.96. If you compare this price to that of an integrated Internet security suite, you will find that the latter is much more cheaper. avast! Internet Security will cost you $49.99, Outpost Security Suite Pro will cost you $24.97 and Kaspersky Internet Security will cost you $59.99. These suites may have a couple of extra features and they may be much cheaper, but the level of protection provided by this setup surpasses that of any integrated Internet security suite.

avast! Pro Antivirus, SPAMfigther PRO and Outpost Firewall Pro each has a free version as well, making them a great choice for a free Internet security setup you don't have $88.96 to spend on computer security software.

 About the Author
Coenraad is webmaster and founder of Cyber Top Cops, leaders in Internet security, analysers of security software and raising awareness about internet fraud and malicious software

Spammers Replying To E-mail You Did Not Send

By Coenraad De Beer

Spammers are always on the lookout for ways to bypass our spam filters. Lately they have been very successful at this, because many people are complaining that tons of e-mails are getting past their spam filters. Spammers are combining old techniques with new ones, making it hard for even the most advanced and best trained Bayesian spam filter to keep junk mail out of our mailboxes.

Last year I came across a poster on Yahoo! Answers asking for advice on a strange e-mail she received. According to this poster she received a reply from someone on an e-mail she never sent. She immediately thought that the spammer hacked her e-mail account, sent an e-mail to himself and then replied to it. This is not impossible, but there are easier ways to do this, without hacking an e-mail account.

E-mails are plain text documents that can be modified and manipulated with a simple text editor like Notepad. The spammer simply saves any e-mail to a file, opens it with Notepad and puts your e-mail address in the "From" field. The spammer then imports it into an e-mail client and replies to this manipulated e-mail. This is only one of many ways to manipulate an e-mail message.

Spammers normally use a technique called hash busting. Hash busting is when you add random text at the beginning or at the end of an e-mail. The text makes no sense and consists of excerpts from books, articles and news bulletins. This text randomises the size, as well as the contents of the e-mail, making it hard for spam filters to find a pattern in the e-mail to base its filtering decisions on. For instance, an e-mail consisting of an image only will normally be flagged as spam, but if someone adds random text below the image, it changes the pattern of the e-mail and the spam filter can no longer use the criteria mentioned earlier to label the e-mail as spam. There are legitimate e-mails like this and the spam filter needs additional training to know which e-mails with embedded images, containing text below the image, are spam and which ones are not.

Some spammers realised that people became suspicious of the senseless text in spam e-mails, so they started to hide the text by making the colour of the text the same as the background colour. Other spammers make the size of the text so small that it appears like a horizontal line between paragraphs or at the bottom of the e-mail. The techniques used to conceal the hash buster text are easily detectable by a good spam filter because no decent person will send someone else an e-mail with hidden text or text that cannot be seen with the naked eye. So the spammers fail more often to get their e-mails through the spam filters when they use cloaking techniques like this.

Spammers needed a way to make the hash buster text look legitimate to the user as well as the spam filter. This is when they came up with the idea of pretending to reply to an e-mail message that was never really sent to them in the first place. The spammer creates the forged e-mail with hash buster text and then replies to it. The spammer still enjoys the benefits of the hash buster text coupled with a better chance to get past any spam filter, because the e-mail appears like a legitimate reply to a previous e-mail sent by the victim. A reply to an e-mail you sent to someone else is seldom unwanted and the spam filter will therefore be less suspicious about it, unless it contains specific keywords and phrases that trigger the spam filter.

But there are more consequences for the victim than just a spam filter not being able to filter the e-mail as spam. Spammers can include anything in these fake e-mails. They can even pretend that you enquired about one of their products. Instead of spamming you with an unwanted e-mail, they pretend to send you a reply to your initial enquiry, an enquiry you never sent. Abuse departments can easily use this as an excuse not to take action against the spammer. They may argue that the spam victim did not receive an unwanted commercial e-mail, because the victim enquired about something and the accused simply replied to that enquiry. Luckily abuse departments need to prove that the original e-mail was really sent before rejecting the complaint, but we all know that very few abuse departments actually take any spam reports serious these days.

It is because of the lack of proper legislation as well as poor implementation and enforcement of existing legislation that we have to deal with waves of spam every day. We are constantly one step behind cyber criminals and our current spam filters cannot keep up with all the tricks and techniques used by spammers to force their junk down our throats. There is a widespread appeal for better filtering and alternative communication methods. There is merit in developing better spam filters, but how do you replace a communication medium like e-mail without disrupting individuals and businesses that depend on it every day to stay in contact with friends, family and clients? What's the use of taking away a communication medium if you do not take action against the individuals who abuse it? It will only be a matter of time before spammers start to abuse the system replacing e-mail. You need to take action against the root of the problem and not the infrastructure through which the problem occurs.

About the Author
Coenraad is webmaster and founder of Cyber Top Cops, leaders in Internet security, prevention of online fraud and educating users about online scams and malicious software.