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Mailwasher has that feature, plus a few more. http://www.mailwasher.net/

http://www.mailwasher.net/

Its a band-aid, but a very useful one for users of pop mailboxes.

I'm a Linux user, more specifically a Window Maker user, who had to use Windows. Window Maker has a simlar interface, as I understand it, to Mac OS/X. Here are the apps that help me suffer through my daily Windows experience:

* Productivity (spreadsheet)
I stay away from Microsoft Office in favor of OpenOffice.org. It runs faster and preforms all the same tasks that I need to preform under Office.

* Graphics
As far as Windows goes, you can't go wrong with Photoshop. On linux I use the Gimp. For image viewing, I use gqview on both Linux and Windows (windows version: http://gqview-win.sourceforge.net/). Its fast and works well.

* Utilities (spam, anti-virus, FTP etc)
Spam identification should be done on the server side, but just in case MailWasher is awesome (http://www.mailwasher.net./ For antivirus, I use BitDefender. I'm old school, so WS_FTP is the only way to go.

* Games
Thats why I have Nintendo. Computers are my interface to the 'net and a tool. Don't do much gaming.

* Online enhancements (e.g. toolbars etc)
FireFox. There is no better browser period.

* Other
Coming from OS/X your going to want YzDock. The homepage is missing, but you can download it from numerous locations, just google for YzDock. It is, as you probably have guessed, an implimentation of the OS/X dock on Windows. There are other docks out there but this one works the best, at least for me.

Outside these apps, I use a number of utilities you may or may not be interested in as well. The quick utilities I use on every install can be found at http://arthur.jfmi.net/win/. WinRoll is used to shade windows. I find shading and not minimizing is far more productive. Cygwin.com is useful if your into the Unix interface. Cygwin provides a POSIX layer, X-server, Bash shell, and much much more. VNC is great for remotely managing desktops. VirtuaWin sets up virtual desktops. Tweakui is a great tool for ridding yourself of annoyances on Windows.

I hope this helps.

I'm running Windows, and use Mailwasher and enable the Spamcop integration. It will let me select the messages that get reported to SPAMCOP as well as use some of the black hole lists to mark messages for deletion. It's a fairly complex program, and an excellent first line of defense. Even lets you bounce messages as if the mail server didn't find your address and report messages to additional SPAM databases. All in all, a useful program.

One of these days I need to get around to seeing if it will run under Wine.

It even works for hotmail

Or just bounce the emails while continuing to use email normally.

Check out Mailwasher.

Has a great bounce function, although in my experience bounces don't neccesarily always cause a removal from spam lists.

I use Spamcop, indirectly. Mailwasher will use an IP based blacklist if you want it to. I don't have mail auto-deleted just because it's from a Spamcop listed site, but if mail doesn't get through any of the whitelisting (certain keywords in the subject, certain addresses that don't get spam, friends addresses which are whitelisted, etc) then mail from sites listed in Spamcops blacklist may get a quick glance - or maybe not.

I know some people feel that since Spamcop got bought out by a company with enough money to handle the bandwidth, legal situations, etc, that SpamCop must now be "evil", but I don't get it. Ironport doesn't have a history of sending spam, yet people keep acting like any company that does bulk email is inherently a spammer. You're still using Slashdot, too, but I guarantee they send a lot of email every day.

Ran into this same problem at my company... Tested two different things out:

Mailwasher - Not a challenge/response like you asked for, but allows you to send bounces back to spam, and delete them off of the server before you donwload them. Can tie into SpamHaus and such.

ChoiceMail - Challenge response, both single user and enterprise are available. Single user sits on local machine, enterprise ties into Exchange. Can quickly add anyone in your Outlook contact list to the whitelist, and anyone you send an e-mail to can be set to be whitelisted. The challenge message can be customized. Biggest problem with the bounce (at least in my testing) is that the challenge gets rated as spam by my filters. I'm sure if the challenge was tuned up it wouldn't be that big of a problem. And they have a free trial so you can test it for 14 days

Nephilium

I use Avast, it works just as well and is free. I switched from Norton after not wanting to pay every year. It catches all the virii my girlfriend manages to get into the computer (about 2 a week lately).

Another useful program is Mailwasher (there is also a non-pro version). Shows all your mail on the server, including the virii (which it labels) so you can delete them without downloading them into your inbox (it is also great for spam, but turn off the 'bounce' function).

Are we sure spammers don't care about bad addresses in their lists? Because I used to get as much spam as anybody before I started using something called MailWasher. Gradually the amount of spam I was receiving decreased from enough to make me consider the address unusable to the level it is now where it's an unusual day if I receive even one spam email. The novelty of the MailWasher approach is that in addition to deleting the spam you have the option of replying to it with a forged bounce message from a mailer daemon. MailWasher is a Windows-only application, but the principle should be relatively simple to code into any of a dozen different approaches. I know the Hmmm link suggests that this should be completely fruitless because spammers won't care. But I'm just old-fashioned enough to find success difficult to argue with.

Chuck

Also nice are programs that let you delete the email at the server before you download, such as mailwasher, and with free versions.

Of course, there are a number of alternate email clients out there that will also help block this beastie

Mailwasher Software
I just send a bogus invalid email addresses back at them.

mailwasher is free (as in beer) lets you log into any pop3 server and preview the messages that are on it and delete and/or bounce any mail you don't want without having to download it. This is helpfully if someone sends you a huge e-mail and you don't want to waste hours downloading it.

Since I started using MailWasher (free; Linux-compatible version info here), I haven't had any spam in my inbox. I realize that this doesn't solve the spam problem, but it sure does help out until the Spamish Inquisition comes along and puts things right.

All I can say is: check out mailwasher : check out your mail while it's still on the server and choose which to bounce. ie. get on the spammer's bounce lists, and watch your spam count go down way faster than spamcop or any other alternative!

I use SpamAssassin to sort and tag the spam server-side, with my threshold set at 5. Or rather I should say the ISP hosting my domain uses SpamAssassin, I don't have full control over the mail server.

Then I use Mailwasher mainly to preview the messages on the server before downloading them. Mailwasher has its own filters to tag and bag spam, and they're pretty good. Do NOT use Mailwasher's fake bounce feature, it only contributes to the problem. I get the full source of the messages before downloading and report them to SpamCop.

I then use Mozilla Mail for the actual downloading and reading, which of course has its own Bayesian filtering, but messages have already gone through two other filters before they reach it. The funny thing is that even though I preview the messages with Mailwasher, I don't delete them on the server, I want them for training purposes.

I use throw-away accounts on SpamGourmet if I need to sign up for anything online.

I only get maybe three spams a week to my real email address, so all of this may be a tad extreme. But perhaps this paranoia (I'm also very protective of my email address to begin with) is *why* I get so little spam.

My Hotmail account, OTOH, was getting about 20-30 per day, five or six of those were making it past the filters into my inbox. Since I don't use the account for much serious correspondance, I finally set myself to "Exclusive" and whitelisted those few domains that I actually want to get mail from.

Mailwasher for previewing, deleting and even bouncing mail from your server before downloading it to your new computer.

I can only give you my top 10 and hope it ties in with other peoples:

Anti Virus - AVG - Updated regularly and free for non commercial use - FREE
Browser - Mozilla - A stable and standards compliant browser, and not tied in with the OS unlike IE! - FREE
Compression - PowerArchiver - Freeware ZIP/RAR/CAB/LHA/TAR/etc/etc! - FREE
Security - ZoneAlarm - For piece of mind when connected - FREE
Email - MailWasher - Eliminate spam without downloading to your computer - FREE
Registry - RegCleaner - An invaluable registry tool - FREE
MP3 - WinAmp - Still my fav MP3 player after all these years - FREE
MPEG - VLC - A very comprehensive media player - FREE
CD - Daemon Tools - A CD emulator, once a gamer has used this they never uninstall it! - FREE
Games - MAME - An arcade emulator... essential for people over the age of 25! - FREE
FTP & Download - LeechFTP - Unintrusive, easy to use, hard to crash (unlike BPFTP) - FREE


Well thats my two penneth anyway :o)

To bounce mail, if you run Windows try using the free Mailwasher.

Great program. Kills spam dead.

And for those of you that use OE (or any other mail client), get Mailwasher. The one account version is free. If you have multiple POP accounts, you have to pay a small amount to get the "full" version. I've been using it for at least three months and it has labeled every spam mail accordingly and in very few instances does a legitimate mail get tagged. You should also download the extra filters from here. MW just works.

I use Mailwasher There is both a free version and a $29.95 pro version.

Not quite an outlook integrated product, but the learning curve is easy.

One of the nice features is that the mail is checked while still on the server, so the traffic is reduced a bit.

It's got a few nice features. The latest incarnation of the freeware version is limited to one account,and does not include Hotmail access, but older versions did not have these limitations.

You might like to try MailWasher. It's free (although there's a Pro version too).

A week later, spam to my hotmail account has dropped from 30 or so a day to about 2. (Warning: Hotmail support is only provided in the pay version, but there's a 30-day trial.) Preview the spam on the server, and you're able to delete it, blacklist it, and best of all, bounce it back to the sender. In my wildest dreams, I never thought it would work so well. YMMV.

Another kick-ass product is Spam Gourmet. Some website wants your email address? Give them (unique identifer).(some number).(your user name)@spamgourmet.com . The number is the number of emails they can send before the address is killed, and the user name is your user name at spamgourmet. Go sign up, and you never have to go back to the site again. It works.

I'm sure many people are like me, and read these testimonials and figure that they're hype. Trust me. They're not. I wish I had done it the first time I read about them.

Try MailWasher, it does a heuristic scan of all mail coming in, you can quickly check to see if things have been detected correctly, and then you can actually bounce spam back, as if your mail server rejected it. This may get your email address removed from spammers' lists.

Although there is no native Linux version, there are instructions on how to get it working under WINE here

As a side note, Dirk suggested Yahoo. Yahoo uses fairly effective built-in spam protection. I currently get no spam at all (after 8 months of use), I get POP access and a 6MB mailbox on yahoo.co.nz (or 4MB for yahoo.com don't ask me why)

I've been using Sneakemail for awhile, it allows for totally disposable addresses with FULL accountability for each sender.

For example, say a spammer grabs my address from here despite the /. filtering (which every site should have). Every email forwarded from sneakemail shows which specific one-time address it was sent to on the subject line. And since sneakemail allows you to filter each individual address seperately by every sender that's ever mailed that address if nessesary, I can easily turn off the spam while not having to truely discard an address. Plus it's great to know exactly where your address was harvested from, in fact one I've gotted alot of spam from was a one-time address I used for a techdirt.com spam article reply I made!

Did I mention it's a quick bookmark popup thats easy to use and free (banner supported) or cheap premium (6 months $12US).

This is of course only part of the solution, for the rest I use Mailwasher.

Jonah Hex

MailWasher for Windows does exactly that. You begin compiling a "friends" and "foes" list that help sort incoming mail. You can toggle whether to use blackhole lists to automatically mark mail as spam or probable spam. Then you can delete and/or bounce messages in bulk. It's simply delightful.

For Windows there is Mailwasher

Try this if your wife uses Windows. Great program.

Yep

If gives you huge satisfaction when you click the "process mail" button and you see all the spam being deleted and bounced.

csw

Being a Web Developer, I do a great deal of business on the web so my addy is everywhere. I would probably get thousands of pieces of spam a day if I didn't use filters. That's insane. I use mailwasher to make e-mail as spam and bounce it back. There are probably more elegant solutions but it sees to have lessened my spam a bit. I think part of the problem is that some people actually buy from spam. If everyone would refuse to buy anything or from anyone that ever sent bulk email, they'd stop doing it. Why should they bother if it doesn't work? I know people who complain about spam who will actually order from bulk emails! My computer illiterate relatives are always printing out spam for vacations and cell phones to let me read to see if it's legit. Then again, how popular can these ads be? How many people actually want to enlarge their penis and see "barnyard love" . . . On second thought, I don't want to know. It'd be interesting to see the return rates on spam though.

I use Mailwasher, which "washes" email based on downloading the headers from the mail server and filtering them using a number of approaches at once: Blacklisting, language checking (I think, at least if you preview it), filters that you set up yourself, and a learning over time of what you have done. It bounces the spam with a fake "no such user" message and can also operate in the background. And best of all: I allows me to filter out spam for all email accounts on my web site at once.

However, it is still susceptible to faked subject lines and mail addresses etc., it still requires that I check its actions (though I have only seen two false positives so far, and they were not on my personal email account but on someone else's (and therefore not based on my criteria).

The key to killling spam is to kill the economics - and to do that, we must have integrated filtering based on each user's preferences, done as a natural activity over time, using all the anti-spam weapons in our arsenal. While I agree that bandwidth waste is a problem, it is temporary, bandwidth is cheap compared to user time, and if everyone starts to filter based on the content and because it is an integrated part of the mail package, we will get rid of this thing.

So Kudos to Mozilla, and I sure hope that the next rel of Netscape (7.0 is built on Mozilla 1.1) will make spam filtering integral and natural. If everyone filters, the economic rationale for spam disappears. So make filtering easy....

MailWasher is another one, I've been using it a month or so now, and its quite good.

It checks messages against a set of rules then allows you to bounce them, delete them, etc. before you download them off your mailserver.

Its good for people who get a low-med amount of spam (15-20 per day)

I've heard good things about MailWasher. Their site seems to indicate that it can be used by any Windows POP3 mail client. Never used it myself though (running SpamAssassin on the server).

You make a few good points but some of this sounds a bit paranoid.

> So of course Microsoft would like things to quiet down right
> now. It's because they've already set the traps that they hope will
> capture Linux and the Internet.

So far, so good.

> These traps include:
>
> - .Net

.NET is good technology. Look, if someone else had invented it, let's say Sun
or IBM, would people be so upset about it? It's going to make web services
easier to implement. Let J2EE have a little competition and we'll all benefit.

> - Palladium

The only credible benefit of Palladium to the consumer is spam blocking.
Digital rights management is usually consumer-hostile and tends to be defeated.
This one has little chance of success; too big brother-ish. Keep your
congress-peops informed of your opinions. Meanwhile, there's a couple of
products out that already do spam blocking in a similar way
(ChoiceMail, Mail Washer), and more are coming.

> - Windows Media protocols over the Internet

WMP is a pretty good format. Let them pour money into improving this important
technology, and we'll all benefit. Anyway, with crossover I can now run
Windows Media in Linux, which is one less reason to run Windows--how does that
help Microsoft? Remember, the media player is a free download.

> - Palladium support for Apache

As above.

> - MS Office lock-in on Linux (Crossover)

As above--it's a lock-in, yes, but it's an unlocking of the operating system.
You don't need Windows to do "real" Office. However, this is almost a red
herring because Star/Open Office, Abi Word, etc. have gotten so good. Anyway,
the research to improve Crossover/Wine has a great side effect; it makes more
Win32 binaries run properly in Linux.

> - ActiveX lock-in on Linux (Crossover)

Hmm. For online banking it's handy but best is to scream at the bank, as a
customer, and demand platform independent banking or you'll move your accounts
elsewhere. Money talks. However, as above, it's a liberation of the OS.

> - .Net support (lock-in) in Qt
> - ActiveX support (lock-in) in Konqueror
> - Windows Media lock-in on Linux (mplayer)

Understand your point but this stuff is redundant.

> - Hardware partnership with AMD (kept API details secret, making Linux unstable)
> - Hardware partnership with NVidia (closed source driver tied into Linux kernel)
> - Hardware lock-in through NVidia (their new graphics language compiler)

Don't know anything about these. Tying a BIOS chipset to a particular OS
sounds dangerous and probably unworkable anyway. If it's that specific and
that secret, it'll certainly break something out there. Dongles failed a long
time ago and any attempt to revive them is a waste of time.

> - Attempted government-mandated IP-security-hardware lock-in

Palladium, in other words.

I'm more optimistic than you, though I agree with your concerns. Anyway my
strategy is to keep pushing for Linux wherever I work and certainly in my home
office. But, if someone builds a better widget well, you know it's still a market system; let the best product win.

Terry

Until this war against spammers is won, I will continue to use Mailwasher.

I know this isn't exactly what you're asking for, but MailWasher does a pretty good job of managing blacklist/whitelist filtering from Windows. You can pick from any number of public blacklists, as well as create your own for anything that sneaks through.

Of course the best way to stop this trash, especially if you are on a modem, is to only grab the headers and delete the stuff you obviously dont want.

Mailwasher is the best I've found for doing this. Not only will it delete from the server, but if it's a notorious spammer then you can tick the bounce box and it will reply with a user unknown error, hopefully meaning you'll never be hassled by those morons ever again.

Pretty effective, and made my life a whole lot easier. And best of all, from their page... "It's free. That's right, you can keep on using this program and it won't expire. You are offered the chance to register MailWasher and pay a price you think it is worth. Think of this payment as a tip - so please contribute something."

Enjoy peoples, and go easy on their server (if I had a decent connection myself, I'd post a mirror, but alas)

I tried, but then had to disable the Bounce feature; most spammers' return addresses were bogus so my bounces bounced back to my ISP's postmaster, causing him extra work.

Granted, running a spam filter is an extra step, but it's much better than dealing with or even deleting separate e-mails in the mail client. On occasion, I've forwarded the spam to abuse@{hotmail|aol|msn}.com (or wherever) plus uce@ftc.gov, even if the From: was obviously forged. If the user account existed, that would get it deleted pronto. One less spammer account.

I wish I could send an electric shock back to spammers. Kind of an electric-eel mail...

If you want a pretty windoze gui for doing the same thing, and free as in 'beer' / nagware, try Mailwasher. The ability to bounce spam and delete virii from POP boxs before downloading, not to mention dickheads who send huge emails is very useful. It has saved me numerous times.

It's actually http://www.mailwasher.net/.

What happened was that his son. artbell jr (or whatever) had been molested by a teacher, who was sent away to jail for a very long time.

The idiot had his own small time talk show on shortwave (I think) Someone had sent the idiot a rumor that had it all backwards, accusing the talk show host father Art Bell of peodophilia. Art Bell had been trying to keep it quiet to protect his son, and eventually came forward with the information on the air, when the rumors got to heavy, and he had to file a law suit. Needless to say, the father was not pleased, hired the best of lean and hungry lawyers, and had at the jerk.

Now there are programs like Mailwasher that let you erase and bounce email before you download it. Of course, Unix admins have been able to do this since the dawn of time.

I'll believe it when my junk email is reduced by even 1% over the course of a month. Even without engaging in 'spam-risky' internet behaviour, ie - using real email address on newsgroups, web boards, signing up for free porn etc, I get a very large load of spam daily. One program that has been great is Mailwasher. This little utility allows you to bounce, blacklist and delete your spam before you download the actual message from your server. I then monthly take the blacklist it generates and add the email address or sometimes a whole domain to my email servers reject file... But still spammers get craftier and craftier. If only I could make a filter that would filter out anything like 12k3jhk213 and asdfl231.. hmm..

Description
From the developer: "MailWasher is your e-mail inbox solution. Not only does it allow you to preview multiple accounts and all aspects of your emails before you download them, it also allows you to delete, and bounce emails back to the originator as if you didn't exist - great for privacy as the sender will receive an email to say the address was unknown - just like a bounced message.
Using this you will see a large reduction in the amount of spam and unwanted email you receive over time. Another feature is heuristic checking, which helps identify and mark emails as normal, virus, possibly virus, possibly spam, probably spam, chain letter, and blacklisted so you can deal with the emails as you wish. Other features are blacklist (which you can add to manually or automatically, and never hear from that person or spammer again), comprehensive customisable filters, use of MAPS RBL to identify spammers, multiple accounts, visual and auditory notification of new emails, heuristic checking to detect viruses and spam, minimization to system tray and much more. Comprehensive online help is available on the website. Compatible with POP3 servers. This is a full version with no restrictions, but donations are gladly accepted. Check out the website www.mailwasher.net if you need to know more and for a screenshot."

I've disabled the preview pane, and automatic send and receive. I have also been using Mailwasher which sits between you and your email box. Its been a useful free Win32 tool in dealing with SPAM, and that is its primary benefit, but I have noticed that it acts as a nice quarantine for incoming mail before it gets to Outlook. I have had plenty of opportunities to squelch virii before they even get to Outlook. Of course it won't save you it you get infected, but it certainly helps reduce the chance of infection.

I'm using Mailwasher it works well for me. Allows you to preview your message headers, delete,blacklist and 'bounce' anything you dont want to recieve. Works well on spam as well as email from your ex-girlfriend.