Mailwasher is an

email filtering Email filtering is the processing of email to organize it according to specified criteria. The term can apply to the intervention of human intelligence, but most often refers to the automatic processing of messages at an SMTP server, possibly appl ...

software for

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

that can detect and delete spam from a user's email when it is on the mail server, before being downloaded to the user's computer. Mailwasher was developed by the

New Zealand New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 List of islands of New Zealand, smaller islands. It is the ...

based company Firetrust. It uses a combination of user defined filters, spam databases and

Bayesian Thomas Bayes (/beɪz/; c. 1701 – 1761) was an English statistician, philosopher, and Presbyterian minister. Bayesian () refers either to a range of concepts and approaches that relate to statistical methods based on Bayes' theorem, or a follower ...

filtering. The filter works on a small portion of each email, and then allows unwanted emails to be directly deleted from the user's

POP3 In computing, the Post Office Protocol (POP) is an application-layer Internet standard protocol used by e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a mail server. POP version 3 (POP3) is the version in common use, and along with IMAP the most comm ...

inbox, without downloading them to the

email client An email client, email reader or, more formally, message user agent (MUA) or mail user agent is a computer program used to access and manage a user's email. A web application which provides message management, composition, and reception functio ...

on the user's computer. This approach is intended to prevent the downloading of spam and other messages infected with malware. There are two versions of the program. The free version can access only a single mail account and does not contain the Bayesian learning filter. The Pro version can access multiple accounts and has additional features.

References

Article on ''Mailwasher Free''
by ''

PC World ''PC World'' (stylized as PCWorld) is a global computer magazine published monthly by IDG. Since 2013, it has been an online only publication. It offers advice on various aspects of PCs and related items, the Internet, and other personal tec ...

''
''Article on Mailwasher Pro''
by ''PC World''

External links

''Mailwasher'' (free version)

''Mailwasher Pro''

Official User Assistance Forum
Spam filtering {{Windows-software-stub