Mailwasher ripoff!

Jack Stoner · Post by **Jack Stoner** » 16 Jun 2010 4:31 am

I bought Mailwasher Pro with "all future version updates". Today I get an e-mail that my subscription for anti-spam updates will expire in 1 week.

If I buy a product with "all future version updates" that should be it, not a "back door" part of this product must be renewed annually.

I will no longer recommend Mailwasher to my friends and clients.

Wiz Feinberg · Post by **Wiz Feinberg** » 16 Jun 2010 8:16 am

Jack;
The subscription that is expiring is for the optional FirstAlert spam reporting community. When you bought a lifetime license to use MailWasher Pro, the first year of FirstAlert was included. After that you have to decide if you want to renew your membership in FirstAlert. There are people who are paid by the fees collected to investigate every report before releasing it to the known spam database. It is a plug-in for MailWasher Pro.

If you activate the Sources Of Spam section, using the SpamCop Blocklist option (bl.spamcop.net), it will flag most known spam, usually faster than FirstAlert does. Additionally, you can add the Spamhaus Blocklists: zen.spamhaus.org and sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org to that list.

I have not used FirstAlert in years, since my year expired a decade ago. I write and publish custom MailWasher spam filers and a blacklist, free to use on a donations accepted basis. If you check out my custom MailWasher filters page and try them, you will find you don't miss FirstAlert.

As for MailWasher Pro, it never expires. You are entitled to a lifetime of program updates and support, as promised.

MailWasher was created and is maintained in New Zealand, by Nick Bolton and his company.

Jack Stoner · Post by **Jack Stoner** » 16 Jun 2010 10:19 am

Wiz, when I converted from the free version to the full paid Pro version there wasn't anything about the First Alert on the page that I was provided for paying for Mailwasher Pro. This caught me completely by surprise.

As I manually go through and mark which ones are SPAM or that I don't want before processing, I never get any unwanted SPAM into my PC. Thus I don't need the First Alert.

Wiz Feinberg · Post by **Wiz Feinberg** » 16 Jun 2010 1:59 pm

Yeah, they should make it optional to join up front, so people won't be caught by surprise when FirstAlert expires. By including it in the first year they are hoping to keep more people in the reporting community.

I am already part of another reporting community; SpamCop, so I don't use FirstAlert. It is a good accessory for businesses, where employees would have to waste company time deciding if a message is spam or legitimate. Once reported, never seen again, if you set the FirstAlert option to auto-delete known spam.

Are you ok with MailWasher now? Have you looked into my custom spam filters yet?

Jack Stoner · Post by **Jack Stoner** » 16 Jun 2010 3:29 pm

I don't really need any SPAM filters. I manually look at every message that comes in to see if it's legitimate or whether it's SPAM and only allow what I want to get to my PC. I don't need any SPAM filters for this.

Chip Fossa · Post by **Chip Fossa** » 26 Jun 2010 2:00 pm

I have MW Pro, and I'm seeing more and more BS coming in, than I've ever seen in the past.

I've been blacklisting and checking off SpamCop with this bilge.

My beef is, I think some of this dreg, even though it is now BL'd, comes up with another different auto-email address, and so, gets through.

I physically check everything out in MW before I open up my email. Anything that smells of a rat is gone.

However, I keep getting 'repeats' even after I have BL'd them. ie. - they do not come through BlackListed, as they should, right? I'm just getting tired BLing stuff I think I already have BL'd. So, right now, I don't bother BLing anything; but I do check off SpamCop. And 'delete' of course; but not 'bounce'.

Something in this garbage is tweaked to by-pass my BL list; I think.

What do you guys think?

All-in-all, however, MW is a Godsend.

Wiz Feinberg · Post by **Wiz Feinberg** » 26 Jun 2010 3:33 pm

Chip;
Check out my custom MailWasher Pro Filters, which contains a very effective general blacklist. Spammers forge all sender names, so direct blacklisting is rarely effective (except for Nigerian 419 scammers).

Chip Fossa · Post by **Chip Fossa** » 26 Jun 2010 3:59 pm

As always, Wizardo

I will definitely be checking out your link. Not tonight, though.

Thanks so much, pally.

Wiz Feinberg · Post by **Wiz Feinberg** » 27 Jun 2010 9:16 am

I should have expanded on my statement about spammers forging sender names. They do this after harvesting email accounts and user names associated with them, and by using bots to break CAPTCHA codes and register for free Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo accounts. They use these throwaway accounts to send through the named services, using the actual spam accounts created by the bots. This is one place where one can sometimes develop regular expression filters to detect spam in the prefix of an email address on Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo.

Example:
Say that a bot is sending spam via a free .com mail service, after creating a series of free accounts all containing the letters "pharma" - or oemsoft, or softoem, or "discount," or "viagr." The following regular expressions, in wildcard entries in the MailWasher Pro Blacklist, will detect and delete them from all .com email services:

oemsoft*@+.com
soft*oem@+.com
pharma*@+.com
*viagr*@+.com
*discount*@+.com

The asterisk * means zero or more characters. The plus means one or more characters. Thus, *viagr* matches these account names:

buyviagra, tryViagra, viagrabuy, viagratry, viagrastore, and just "viagr"

These five blacklist wildcards are very effective, as are these country specific blacklist entries:

+@+.cn
+@+.es
+@+.hinet
+@+.tw
+@+.vn
+@+.ru
+@+.gr
+@+.ukrtel
+@+.br
+@+.jp
+@+.in
+@+.kr
+@+.hk