Comments from new paid subscriber

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Ratfancy
Student Sheep
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Comments from new paid subscriber

Wed Jun 24, 2020 8:29 am

Just wondering how long it takes for MailWasher to "learn". I'm seeing way too much spam slipping through, so my confidence level is low after five days of usage. I have to go through each and every email so that I don't have good emails marked spam, and obvious spam marked good. Silverdating, VISA offers, obvious Netflix fishing emails, and many many obvious fishing emails are marked good. Will this improve? How long will I have to be this scrupulous?
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rusticdog
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Re: Comments from new paid subscriber

Wed Jun 24, 2020 11:34 am

Hi there

It's not about time rather MailWasher having good data. How many emails do you typically get a day ?

MailWasher does treat emails with more uncertainty early on, while the good/bad lists build up.
TWHGM
It begins with a single step
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Re: Comments from new paid subscriber

Mon Jun 29, 2020 1:28 pm

That has been my biggest disappointment, that it does not "learn" and I am still getting tons of spam. I realize that spammers change domains on a daily basis. But you think it would figure out that anything with the same subjects is junk. The spam filter tools are not explained. I would like to know which should be set to high numbers and which to low.
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rusticdog
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Re: Comments from new paid subscriber

Mon Jun 29, 2020 1:35 pm

TWHGM wrote:
Mon Jun 29, 2020 1:28 pm
That has been my biggest disappointment, that it does not "learn" and I am still getting tons of spam. I realize that spammers change domains on a daily basis. But you think it would figure out that anything with the same subjects is junk. The spam filter tools are not explained. I would like to know which should be set to high numbers and which to low.
You shouldn't need to change any of the Learning numbers. Under Settings >> General >> Checking Mail >> set the Spam Throttle to 500 lines per email, that will give MailWasher more email content to work with and would help accuracy.
Ratfancy
Student Sheep
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Re: Comments from new paid subscriber

Mon Jul 06, 2020 4:07 pm

My filter to delete senders "newsletter@" is not working. How to make it work?
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rusticdog
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Re: Comments from new paid subscriber

Mon Jul 06, 2020 4:32 pm

Ratfancy wrote:
Mon Jul 06, 2020 4:07 pm
My filter to delete senders "newsletter@" is not working. How to make it work?
I asked in the other thread that you commented if you can post a screenshot or more details of the filter.

I assume you have the filter set to :
If the FROM, CONTAINS, PLAIN TEXT
newsletter@
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Digerati
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Location: Nebraska, USA
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Re: Comments from new paid subscriber

Tue Jul 07, 2020 2:35 am

That has been my biggest disappointment, that it does not "learn" and I am still getting tons of spam.
If it was as easy as you suggest, spam would have been defeated and eliminated 20 years ago.

I certainly wish it was so easy but the bad guys are not stupid. In fact, they are very cleaver, constantly making changes to thwart and stay 1 step ahead of such learning tools, and to make their emails appear totally legitimate to the detection algorithms, and to us humans too.

It is a difficult, if not impossible balance to tag each and every spam as spam without tagging some legitimate emails as spam (false positives). And for many, including me, having a spam blocker incorrectly tag legitimate emails as bad is a worse offense.

For example, if you are a gmail user (even if you use MailWasher or an email client to access your gmail emails), you need to visit your gmail spam folder directly every 3 weeks because I assure you, there will be legitimate emails in there among the 100s of spam. :( I say every 3 weeks because Google automatically deletes purges the spam folder of tagged emails every 30 days.

It is because "false positives" are so common, you will frequently see new contacts advise us to check our spam folders for their emails. Why do that if properly tagging emails (one way or the other) was so easy?

It is important to note too, how did the spammers get your email address? It is likely you gave it to someone who then gave it to someone who gave (or sold) it to the spammers. Or your computer was infected and your email address stolen. Or one of your contacts had their computer hacked. Or one of your contacts forwarded a joke to a 100 people and one of their computers was hacked.

Over the years, I have tried just about every spam filter/blocker out there. From free to commercial, from Google/Gmail to that provided by my ISP (Cox). And I keep coming back to MailWasher. No, it is not perfect. But if perfection was possible, spam would have been eliminated years ago and there would not be dozens of spam filters out there.

FOR ME - I have 6 email accounts from my ISP and Gmail that I receive 50 - 60 emails sent to everyday. MailWasher Pro makes it simple to organize, sort, delete those I don't need to keep, and keep those I want to keep - all from one inbox without worrying I might accidently download onto my computer something malicious.

And since I have set filters to name and color-code all the legitimate emails I regularly get, MailWasher Pro makes it simple to spot tagged spam, but also emails that were not tagged as spam but were not tagged by one of my filters too. Those "exceptions" are then easy for me to manage manually for keeping, deleting, or marked for learning.
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Ratfancy
Student Sheep
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Newletter filter not working

Wed Jul 08, 2020 2:52 am

My "newsletter@" filter is not working - any ideas? Thanks!
newsletter.JPG
newsletter.JPG (65.68 KiB) Viewed 15629 times
newsletter filter.JPG
newsletter filter.JPG (83.19 KiB) Viewed 15629 times
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rusticdog
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Re: Comments from new paid subscriber

Wed Jul 08, 2020 9:44 am

OK, that looks good. So it's possible the FROM field is encoded.

When encoded the text will look a little like gibberish. MailWasher runs the filters over the text before being decoded. What you see in the Email Header section you posted is in the decoded state as well.
If you click on the Source tab, and look for the line in the header that starts with FROM. Does it read like the above, or does it an odd mix of other characters.

You could also go into Settings >> Spam Tools >> Blacklist >> click the option Wildcard Expression >> in the field provided enter newsletter@* >> click Add. That will blacklist these kinds of addresses.
RJami1
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Re: Comments from new paid subscriber

Thu Dec 22, 2022 3:00 am

I'm curious how long it takes MailWasher to "learn". After five days of use, my confidence level is low due to far too much spam slipping through. I have to go through every email to avoid having good emails marked as spam and obvious spam marked as good. Silverdating, VISA offers, obvious Netflix fishing emails, and a plethora of other obvious fishing emails have been marked as good. Will this get better? How long will I have to be so meticulous?
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AlphaCentauri
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Re: Comments from new paid subscriber

Sun Dec 25, 2022 5:55 pm

Agree with RusticDog. If the part of the email you are trying to filter says "base64," you will have to filter for the encoded string, not the part that actually displays. You CAN do that, it just takes more effort.

There are websites that will let you code/decode base 64. The important thing to know it that it will encode 3-character strings. So for instance, if you have "ere" "here" or "there," the part that encodes "ere" will be different since the groups of three characters will be broken into different groups in each.

You will need to make three filters to get all possible codes, and you should probably drop the first and last characters, as they will vary wildly depending on what characters come before and after the code you're going to filter for. So to look for "newsletter," you may end up filtering for "wslette" with three different variations, as "newslette" "ewsletter" and "wsletters"
SivestonHappy
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Re: Comments from new paid subscriber

Sat Aug 05, 2023 9:59 am

RJami1 wrote:
Thu Dec 22, 2022 3:00 am
I'm curious how long it takes MailWasher to "learn". After five days of use, my confidence level is low due to far too much spam slipping through. I have to go through every email to avoid buy phenq having good emails marked as spam and obvious spam marked as good. Silverdating, VISA offers, obvious Netflix fishing emails, and a plethora of other obvious fishing emails have been marked as good. Will this get better? How long will I have to be so meticulous?
Same thing is with me. My confidence is also very low.
Last edited by SivestonHappy on Tue Aug 08, 2023 11:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
gingbat
Least Evil Firetrust Employee
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Re: Comments from new paid subscriber

Sun Aug 06, 2023 3:08 pm

Yes, learning is not instant like blacklisting or filtering, you need to mark all emails as either thumbs up or down before clicking Wash Mail before MW will start doing this itself for quite a while depending on how much spam you get.

I also find that restarting MW at least daily helps too....
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Digerati
Microsoft MVP
Location: Nebraska, USA
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Re: Comments from new paid subscriber

Mon Aug 07, 2023 3:23 am

My confidence is also very low.
It is also important to understand that the bad guys are very aware security software, including spam blockers/filters are working hard to detect their spam by looking for patterns, trends, malicious activity, keywords (including email addresses, domain names, etc.). Consequently, the bad guys are constantly changing those patterns and keywords in their attempts to stay 1 step ahead of the spam blockers.

MailWasher is excellent at learning to detect spam directed at you, but no spam filter is, or ever will be perfect. That is why spam has been around since the late 1970s and really proliferated when the so called "legitimate" spammers (commercial marketing weenies) started mass mailing ads (whether we signed up for them or not) to millions and millions of people.

If it was easy to stop all spam, it would have been done decades ago.

In my opinion, there is no better spam blocker than MailWasher Pro - and I've tried many. There is a bit of a learning curve to it, but given time, it is well worth it. One of its greatest strengths is the fact it, by default, only downloads the first few lines of the source/header information and message content, and not the entire message. This is a HUGE advantage as that is typically enough information for MWP to determine if good or spam, and more importantly, it gives us users enough information to determine if we want to keep it or not.

This means we can, essentially, process all our emails on the email servers from MWP, instead of downloading them completely on to our systems (including any potentially malicious attachments), and then analyzing them for any malicious code as other spam blockers do. That's a very good thing! :)

I liken other blockers to home owners who invite the stranger into their homes and THEN asking what they want. Whereas MWP is like verifying credentials and intent through a locked gate, out front of the home.

Another problem with all blockers is the potential for false positives - good emails tagged as spam. My primary email provider, gmail, is good and bad about that. They do catch 100s and 100s of spam regularly. But they also regularly tag good emails as spam and sadly, they will automatically delete those after 30 days. This means every 2 - 3 weeks, I have to visit my gmail spam folder and tag those as good. I typically end up creating a filter in gmail to let emails from those senders through.

My secondary email provider, my ISP, is also bad in this regard - frequently tagging good emails as spam. :( If I did not manually change the defaults to let those emails remain in the inbox for MWP to fetch, I would never see those as my ISP would move them to a spam folder, out of reach of MWP. :(

It is very rare that MWP tags a good email as spam. But when it does, it is simple for me to verify, one way or another, and if good, retag it as good (which forces the learning process to learn - another good thing).

Because MWP lets me poll my various email accounts on different email servers, and displays all those in one place (the MWP Inbox) I can easily process all my emails from one place - WITHOUT actually downloading all those emails (including the unwanted emails) to my local machine. This is a HUGE advantage.

The vast majority of "legitimate" emails I get, I don't need to keep. For example, most of my emails are forum or reply notifications, deposits or debit notifications to my bank accounts, Amazon order delivery dates, and sale ad at stores I signed up for, I can view those and learn what I need to know. Then mark them for deletion by MWP. Then when I tell MWP to process my emails, only those few I want to keep actually get downloaded completely to my system and end up with my local email client (Office Outlook - in my case).

I personally am not a fan of using Blacklists (or Friends lists), so I don't. I don't use Blacklists because as I noted above, the badguys are constantly changing their spam to avoid detection. I do, however, have over 2 dozen Filters (including one for Friends and another for Family - this is why I don't need to use the Friendlists). I have enough filters so, of the 50 - 60 emails I get daily, almost all are tagged by one of my filters. :) If there is one that is not, I can easily see immediately if it is legit, or suspicious.

This method works great for me, but you may prefer a different method. And MWP allows that. :)

So give it time. Play with filters (there are some real pros here willing to help you with that). But still, you need to accept some spam, will always get through. But over time, those numbers will continue to get smaller to the point you will go days without any. :)
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