Chrysanth Mail Manager 2.0 - Spam Filter

Chrysanth Mail Manager lets you filters your mail using DNS blacklists of known spammers in an easy to use and elegant interface. Unfortunately, this alone isn't extremely effective and a good deal of spam gets through.

A lot of spam is coming from a few (known) sources. DNS blackhole lists keep track of them, and if you look up whether an email comes from a listed source you can drop it as spam. This is what Chrysanth Mail Manager does for you, and it does it elegantly in a slick, easy to use interface.

Unfortunately, DNS blackhole lists are great as a political measure of pressure on spam-friendly ISPs, but they are not the most precise form of spam filtering. If you don't want to risk blocking — or in the case of Chrysanth Mail Manager deleting — legit mail, you can't put the occasional and involuntary source of spam on such a list.

Some spam will get through, and spammers are pretty good at escaping the more conservative blacklists enabled by default in Chrysanth Mail Manager. One way to get around this is using strict blacklists and relying on Chrysanth Mail Manager's support for Hashcash, a way to detect mail from good senders.

Unfortunately, few people use Hashcash yet. In addition to DNS list checking, Chrysanth Mail Manager lets you maintain your own local black and white lists of senders and domains, you can set up rules that look for certain words or phrases in email headers.

Chrysanth Mail Manager also offers statistics and graphs about how much (Chrysanth-detected) spam you have received. Unfortunately, that doesn't really improve the detection rate and precision much either.