Good anti-spam for self-hosted email on outlook 2013

[x86kindaguy]

Hi

I get anywhere from 30 to 50 spam emails a day sent to my inbox on my self-hosted business email.

Unfortunately using gmail isn’t an option as I have 4 emails (support, accounts, sales, enquiries). I’d love to use gmail to receive emails though.

I am on a trial copy of spamfighter which seems to work OK. The only problem is it requires a license on each machine. So even though my time is divided between my desktop and laptop. I have to buy 2 licenses, at £45 (year license) per machine. Seems a little bit OTT.

Any other solutions you can recommend? I’m using outlook 2013. Do the newer versions of outlook have better spam filtering?

[jmarket]

Try mailwasher, not free but reasonable. There is a free version but its limited to one email account and has ads. Good enough to try it out.

[phillpower2]

Any update x86kindaguy?

[x86kindaguy]

Thanks, mailwasher is a bit better than spamfighter as they have a lifetime license and allow you to install on up to 3 machines. I’ve installed it and will give it a try. The trouble with these client side anti spam is the false positives are quite high.

[x86kindaguy]

The only criticsm I can find with mailwasher is that it is quite unintuitive to use. You have to first open mailwasher to empty your spam and then open outlook to review and reply to your email. Nobody else does anti spam this way, it’s all done in the background. With mailwasher you are putting spam mail at the forefront, dealing with it before your actual emails. I’ll give it a try for a month and see how it goes.

[jmarket]

I have used Mailwasher for years and once you have “trained” it to your needs it requires nearly no setting in daily use. The beauty of mailwasher for me is it shows your mail which once trained is marked as good, or blacklisted, and or bounced. By doing this it allows me to scroll through the messages on the server and either accept (and download) my trained settings, or add other mail to my blacklist. By doing this I neither delete mail which I shouldn’t, nor allow through crap. I now get no false positives, but yes it does take a little time to learn your preferences.

I’ll give it a try for a month and see how it goes.

Nobody can ask you to do more than that, sure Mailwasher does take a bit of initial setup, but as you say you should have a pretty good idea in a month. I have no alliance with Mailwasher but the learning curve associated with it has been good for me.

Hope it goes well for you?

[x86kindaguy]

Thanks for the tip with mailwasher.

It’s working well and the spam has reduced massively.

I did notice that a LOT of spam was coming from my own comment form (contact form 7) via the wordpress website. I managed to take action by installing akismet and honeypot. I couldn’t allow mailwasher to deal with that otherwise it would delete legitimate contact form enquries but honeypot and akismet together work a treat.

Its nice and peaceful without the spam. I can deal with the enquiries and not have to press delete on all the spam.

[veeg]

Any updates?

[x86kindaguy]

HI vger.

Yes I am happy with mailwasher.

It works quite well and gets most of the spam.

[x86kindaguy]

I have used Mailwasher for years and once you have “trained” it to your needs it requires nearly no setting in daily use. The beauty of mailwasher for me is it shows your mail which once trained is marked as good, or blacklisted, and or bounced. By doing this it allows me to scroll through the messages on the server and either accept (and download) my trained settings, or add other mail to my blacklist. By doing this I neither delete mail which I shouldn’t, nor allow through crap. I now get no false positives, but yes it does take a little time to learn your preferences.

Nobody can ask you to do more than that, sure Mailwasher does take a bit of initial setup, but as you say you should have a pretty good idea in a month. I have no alliance with Mailwasher but the learning curve associated with it has been good for me.

Hope it goes well for you?

Did you go for the lifetime license? What was the best discount coupon you could get for it and what price?

I purchased “lifetime licenses” in the past and the software was no good after a couple of years. I bought wordpress themes and plugins which were “lifetime” and the developer stopped updating it and soon became incompatible with the latest wordpress.

[jmarket]

Yes It is a lifetime license but it was many years ago I got it, and I have no recollection of how much. Sorry.