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Mail Box Dispatcher 2.30 - Spam Filter

About.com Rating four out of Five

By Heinz Tschabitscher, About.com

Mail Box Dispatcher - Spam Filter

Mail Box Dispatcher - Spam Filter

Heinz Tschabitscher

The Bottom Line

Mail Box Dispatcher is a handy tool that spots spam in POP accounts precisely and lets you get rid of it before you even download the unwanted messages in your main email program. Its many options and actions are a source both for flexibility and potential confusion.
Pros
  • Mail Box Dispatcher eliminates spam in a swift and precise manner using learning filters
  • A broad system of events and actions associated to them allows you to customize Mail Box Dispatcher
  • Mail Box Dispatcher deletes unwanted mail right at the server before you download it
Cons
  • Mail Box Dispatcher works with POP accounts only
  • The many options and possible actions available in Mail Box Dispatcher can be a bit confusing
  • Mail Box Dispatcher does not integrate with email clients, requiring one extra step

Description

  • Mail Box Dispatcher checks multiple POP email accounts for spam, automatically or manually.
  • Spam is found using a few rules and a learning filter using Bayesian statistics.
  • In addition, Mail Box Dispatcher offers black and white lists of senders and words.
  • Mail Box Dispatcher can automatically mark spam it detects for deletion on the server.
  • To help you decide, Mail Box Dispatcher shows a textual preview of the beginning of all mail.
  • You can also launch your email client and open or reply to specific messages directly.
  • Mail Box Dispatcher supports Windows 98/ME/2000/3/XP.

Guide Review - Mail Box Dispatcher 2.30 - Spam Filter

Wouldn't it be great if there was no spam to filter? While this is still a distant dream, you can take one step in this direction by pre-filtering your mail before you download it — only the good mail then — in your main email client.

Mail Box Dispatcher is a swift and smart tool for that job. Using a few rules and, more importantly, a Bayesian classifier, Mail Box Dispatcher can spot spam pretty precisely after you have trained it for some time.

While this training is pretty straight forward, I must confess it was not obvious for me from looking at Mail Box Dispatcher alone that "Del" means to "learn this as spam" while "UnDel" allows you to correct a false positive. Fortunately, you can add a dedicated "Learning" command to Mail Box Dispatcher that will explicitly show (and lets you change) whether a message will be learned as good or as bad mail.

Deleting the junk right at the server is what Mail Box Dispatcher is really good at and for. Unfortunately, it only works with POP accounts.

While you can create your own filters and assign various actions to them (to warn you about big messages, for example), Mail Box Dispatcher's default setup usually works pretty well.

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