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.
