Labs

MailWasher works in a very different way to the other programs here. It acts almost like an email program in its own right. It checks your mail and, by default, downloads the first 20 lines. It analyses the message and decides if it's spam or not. It marks suspicious messages and, when you click the Process Mail button, the program goes back online and selectively deletes the spam from your ISP's mail server. When you run your email program it only finds the messages that are left by MailWasher, which you'd expect to be real messages.

The full version of MailWasher includes a

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one-year subscription to the FirstAlert! anti-spam service, a database of spam messages. MailWasher compares your email with the archive of known spam and, when it finds a match, it can confidently delete the message. MailWasher also integrates with a couple of well-known mail server blacklists that monitor the parts of the internet from which spam is sent. It has entries for SpamCop and ORDB, although those with experience of spam blacklists can add their own entries.

In practice we had some bad experiences with MailWasher. The part of the website where you can buy the software was broken and only fixed after we posed as a user and complained. The free trial version missed all our spam and deleted nearly 29 per cent of our real email, too. We then spent £20 and watched as the software deleted all our spam, as well as nearly all our other messages. We were left with just 4.4 per cent of our real email.

The main advantage of MailWasher is that you don't have to download all the spam in your mailbox to allow it to detect spam messages. However, you'll have to spend some time tinkering around to get close to the accuracy afforded by less expensive software.