HelpDesk: What To Use To Screen Emails
A while back you recommended MailWasher. Do you still use and recommend it for pre-screening email? I noticed that it’s a desktop install. Any comparable web apps that you know of? Chers, Doug Lietz.
Hey Doug. Good to see you around again. I still use MailWasher to screen my emails. Because MailWasher can ‘learn’, the longer you use it, the more accurate it gets. Yes it is a desktop installation. So when I am on the road I lose this great feature.
However, there are many ways to set this up. At the very basic level is simply to use the filters at your web host level. On certain email accounts I know are just crazy on spam, I setup a filter at my web host control panel.
If you have cPanel, there are actually two very useful tools you can make use of. First is SpamAssassin which has been around for a long time.
You can create your own filters using SpamAssassin or just create or you can let it do things automatically and delete known Spam automatically although I do not recommend that as you will lose a few emails. I normally just let SpamAssassin tag the spam messages with a [SPAM] in the subject line and let MailWasher take care of them.
The other one is Box Trap. This works a lot like those paid solutions. It requires senders to respond to be added into a whitelist. Those who respond will be able to send and receive emails normally. Those who don’t will have their emails rejected.
I’m not one who goes for fancy spam management. A bunch of my emails are outsourced. The ones that come directly to me are one-on-one clients and personal emails. If things get too hairy I would rather redirect it to an assistant.
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Hi Lynette,
Thanks for taking the time to address my question. I ended up installing MailwasherPro and have been using it for a while now. One of the features I like the most is the red / white / green color coding for each of the email line items. This makes the “sorting and turfing” process, dare I say, almost enjoyable.
But since I started using MailwasherPro, there’s something that puzzles me. How is it that some spammers can make their messages appear to be coming from me by placing my email address in the FROM line? And furthermore, does this mean that my email address is likely being hijacked to send spam to 1000’s of other unsuspecting recipients as well?
[DISCLAIMER: If you ever receive an email message from me suggesting that you consider purchasing body-part-enhancement products, it wasn’t me… :O].
Doug.
Hey Doug, thanks for coming by again. I really like MailWasher too and you know, in combination with Spam Assassin, I set up Mailwasher to filter those with emails out as well so I don’t even see them.
Yes, it is a form of email hijacking Doug. Unfortunately there is little you can do about that 🙁 And the thing that sucks, when people hit reply it comes straight to you. If you ever get accused by someone, just tell them to redirect (don’t forward) the email to you. If they can’t redirect, ask them to take a screen shot of their full email headers. You can then tell immediately these are not from your server and easily explain it.
The worry is if they are from your server and you didn’t send them now that is something to be seriously worried about. That’s why I recommend not hosting email newsletter yourself, too easy to hijack. And I know you use Aweber – good decision.
Talking about spam, I also like how MailWasher makes it super easy to spot Phishing attempts. It tells you exactly where the links in the email really goes to.