Cloudeight Information Avenue Spam Management

We tested 20 Anti-Spam software programs in the past 2 weeks. We ended up uninstalling them all. Some after a few hours; some after a few days. Many were tedious and confusing to set up. Others were easy to set up. Some removed much of the spam; unfortunately these tended to remove a lot of good email too. Some removed no spam that we could determine. Some even fired off letters to potential spammer's ISP addresses, Web hosts and the like; thereby generating its own spam. How cute! None of these programs, while intimating at "artificial intelligence" had any intelligence or reasoning ability to determine which mail we wanted or which mail we didn't in many cases. Some were better than others and some were absolutely worthless. Someday someone will get it right and create an anti-spam program that is 90% effective. We realize that nothing will ever be 100% effective. More sophisticated software will surely breed more sophisticated spammers. If a program could be 90% effective, though, we would be happy and we'd recommend it. For now, our advice to you is: Save your money! After 2 frustrating weeks we went back to our trusted ways of dealing with spam and malicious email.

We receive thousands of emails a week. There are two of us who founded and maintain Cloudeight and we read and answer all the mail. (Most of you know we go affectionately by "Eightball & Thundercloud"). We're in two different states. We both have our own preferences as to the software we use to manage spam and malicious email. The reason why this type of spam management works so well is because we can think (or at least we think we can think :-) ) We know at a glance what we want and what we don't. Let's look at Eightball's #1 spam management tool first:

Eightball Gives MailWasher a big smilie.

Mailwasher is an enhanced Email checker. When you set it up for the first time it reads your account data from Outlook Express and imports your account settings. All you have to do is remember your password for each account the first time you check email. Mailwasher is unique in that it gives you the opportunity to bounce the mail back to the spammer in an attempt to make it appear your email address is not valid. Mailwasher lets you preview your email while it is on your ISP's email server and delete what you don't want to download to your computer. It also has filters that set up quite easily. It lets you read your mail (although plain text only) while it on the server (but not reply to it). After washing your mail with Mailwasher, you can then open Outlook Express or Outlook and download only the mail that you want. Mailwasher has a free version available which displays a banner. You can get rid of the banner by making a small contribution. Unlimited email accounts. You can have as many email accounts as you want to check. Supports POP3 email accounts, MSN and Hotmail. AOL will be coming in a later version. Read more about Mailwasher and download it here.

Thundercloud gives PopPeeper a big smilie.

PopPeeper is another enhanced Email Checker. While it doesn't have all the filtering options or bounce options of Mailwasher (PopPeeper has none), it's very compact, easy-to-use, and extremely easy to set up. One thing it lets you do that Mailwasher doesn't is read HTML mail on the server. POP Peeper is a utility that runs in your Windows task bar and alerts you when you have new email on any of your POP3, Hotmail, MSN or Yahoo accounts. You can also use POP Peeper to read and delete your email. POP Peeper supports HTML email, so you can see your email the same way as you would in your email client. PopPeeper's layout and listing of emails is very nicely done and you can choose a different color for each account so you can tell at a glance which account the mail was sent to. PopPeeper supports unlimited mail accounts and is completely free. Read more about PopPeeper and download it here.

One we're testing! It's looking good! Has some features the other two doesn't have, like AOL support.

ePrompter is a similar to Mailwasher and PopPeeper. Lets you delete spam or suspicious mail without having to Launch Your Email Program. Automatically and simultaneously checks and retrieves your email messages from up to sixteen password protected email accounts such as AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, POP3, Earthlink, Juno, MSN, Go.com, Email.com, Mail.com, Mindspring, OneBox, USA.net and thousands of regular domains too .It checks and retrieves your Yahoo mail without you having to pay $29.95 per account to Yahoo for POP3 access or message forwarding.ePrompter also lets you compose, forward and reply to your retrieved messages, again without having to launch your regular email program. ePrompter is free and you can get more information and download it by clicking here.

We hope that one of these 3 programs will be just right for you. And, we're sure that any one of these programs will be invaluable weapons to help you fight the war on spam!

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