MailWasher Pro By Cade Metz February 17, 2004

• Product: MailWasher Pro
• Direct Price: $29.95 direct
• Company Info: Firetrust Ltd., www.firetrust.com

Editor Rating:

Firetrust's MailWasher Pro suffers from the same problem as ChoiceMail, DigiPortal's popular whitelisting product: It doesn't integrate with your mail client. Instead, it resides in a completely separate window that is, in effect, a second in-box. More important, the product performed poorly on our tests: It caught less spam than any other utility in our review, and its false-positive rate was a regrettable 16 percent.

With apps like Norton AntiSpam and Qurb, which so tightly integrate with Outlook, your quarantined mail is sitting right there in your e-mail client. Taking a peek is easy. With MailWasher, you can't check your quarantined messages—or deal with them—without toggling to another window. The app's lone advantage is that it works with almost any POP3, IMAP, AOL, or Hotmail account. It does not, however, handle Exchange accounts.

We also wish that the software was a bit easier to install; you must manually input your e-mail server and user name during setup. That said, MailWasher does have strengths: You can create your own message filters. You can blacklist and whitelist entire domains. And if you feel like blowing off a little steam (though it won't actually help), you can bounce messages back to whence they came.