"Mac, are you saying that Mailwasher, which I installed overnight, will do a clean up job before it gets to my inbox? I have two mails so far and IT ignored them."
Yes, it will, but it isn't psychic!
Mailwasher will download all the headers, and mark for deletion all the items that it thinks are spam, based on Spamhaus/SpamCop lists and Bayesian filters. You then mark spam as such and it will remember this for the future. There is also a learning algorithm, so it gets smarter as you go along. You can also mark stuff for one-time deletion but not as spam. There are many ways of fine-tuning it, such as excluding whole domains - have a read!
Once Mailwasher has finished deleting all the crap from your mailbox it will then open Outlook (or whatever) and you can properly download the washed mail into your inbox.
mixture
"Based on personal experience, I can absolutely irrefutably say that lot you've just spouted is a load of codswallop."
Well, I can absolutely irrefutably say that
you have either not read or not comprehended what I have written (and that you have a nasty temper and don't listen).
"On the system I and numerous others in the world are using, if correctly configured, you get zero false positives and very few misses.
I've been running my present system for over 3 years now, and have indeed had zero false positives, and at most I get two or three spams a week make it through. I run email services for others on the same platform too... so we're talking a substantial number of messages being parsed."
I can quite believe it, for by using Brightmail or Postini (or Dovecot or SurgeMail or whatever)
you are acting as the ISP/mailserver and can set-up your spam filters as you wish!
Put your bile aside and consider for a moment the following situation - one of my less stable patients regularly forwards to me vast amounts of fundamentalist Christian literature which I have no interest in. This is not spam as such and there is no way for my ISP (MWeb) to know that I do not wish to receive these communications.
I do not control my POP/IMAP server and neither do most of us.
When I wish to check my inbox I start by invoking Mailwasher, which downloads the headers and knowing that I do not wish to receive mail from
[email protected], deletes the entire message from the MWeb POP server. When I have removed all the crap, Mailwasher will then invoke my email client and I can download the rest.
Most people will have realised by now that we are talking about two different things, one is the situation of the ordinary user who accesses their mail through a POP/IMAP provider - the other, as in mixture's case, is administration of a POP/IMAP server where you can of course configure your filters as you like.
This is not rocket science guys - either mixture is being extremely dense or....
Mac
