MAIL NOTIFICATION - MINIMIZE TO TASKBAR - BOUNCEBACK FEATURE

[abrandt]

Hello,

Is Spamcombat capable of:

1. Mail Notification - sound or blinking icon vs. using my Mozilla Mail Manager to indicate new mail.

2. Minimize task bar (far right-hand cornor in Win 2000)?

Thank you,

Alan

[marisp]

In the current version of the SpamCombat there is no mail notification option either ability to minimize the program to task bar. Thank you for your suggestions. We added them to our To Do list for future releases.

[abrandt]

Hello Marisp,

Thank you for a prompt response.

I have been using MAILWASHER up to this point... which does provide the (2) features I've inquired about:
- Mail Notification
- Minimize in task bar

REQUEST: Would you please delineate what FEATURES SpamCombat curently offers that makes it a superior SPAM solution vs. Mailwasher?

Thank you in advance for a prompt response.

Alan

[marisp]

G-Lock SpamCombat 1.0 is the first public release. Naturally, we couldn't implement all the features that the users would need in the first version of the program. We are now collect suggestions for future versions and have already added the mail notification feature and the ability to minimize the program to the task bar to our To Do list.

I read about the Mailwasher (free version) features and noticed the only thing that differs it from the SpamCombat: ability to bounce spam emails. In my opinion this feature is quite pointless. Here is why:

1) Nowadays most spammers do not use their real email addresses in To and From but forge addresses that refer to no user, or enter the emails of some innocent users. So, even a spam message bounces, in most cases it will not reach the real spammer but end up to mailbomb innocent users as well as mailbomb the admin of your ISP who sees all the failed bounces come back to the mailer-daemon. And actually, it is the violation of the ISPs' Acceptable Use Policy.

2) The bounce feature sends back a "forged" bounced message from
mailto:mailer-daemon@yourisp.com - which is completely meaningless after the email has already been successfully delivered.

3) The rejects from a real mailer-daemon happen at the time of the MTA transaction between the mail servers. So, sending back a bounced message, for example, a couple of hours later when you check your email does nothing except verify that you are using the "bounce" feature from the MailWasher. The real MTA transaction was completed hours earlier, and your email address was already verified as being deliverable to the spammer.

The conclusion is that the MailWasher's "bounce" feature does nothing to help you reduce spam you are "bombarded" with every day but only contribute to email abuse.

What makes the SpamCombat superior is the Bayesian filter applied to identify spam emails. The beauty of the Bayesian filter is that it can and should be trained by an individual user to catch emails that this user consider to be spam. Of course, there is the black list that allows to catch most known kinds of spam emails. But there are emails that can be considered as spam by this user but are not spam for another user. So, the Bayesian filter allows to train the SpamCombat to detect emails each individual user thinks spam. The more you train SpamCombat, the more accuracy of the program increases. After spam emails are removed from the server, you can safely run your regular email client to receive only good emails.

[abrandt]

Thank you for the response. Look forward to testing SpamCombat and the coming versions with multiple added improvements.

Alan

[marisp]

We have just released a new version of SpamCombat 1.10. This version allows to set the auto-mode in the program: to automatically check POP3 accounts every xx min and delete spam emails. Now SpamCombat can work minimized to task bar. The emails are permanently deleted from the mail server and saved to the hard disk where they are stored for the specified number of days. Then they are permanently removed from the disk.

IMPORTANT! It is not recommended that you set the auto mode in SpamCombat as soon as you installed the program. If you do not train the program, there is a chance that 'good' emails will be moved to Deleted Items folder. After you have trained SpamCombat for a few weeks approximately and you can see that all your messages are categorized properly, you can set the auto mode in the program.

The new version of SpamCombat 1.10 can be downloaded from our download page: http://www.glocksoft.com/download.htm