From Rick Lecoat <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on Sun, 18 Jul 2004 21:45:26 +0100 [22.45 CET]
>Any comments welcome. I also received such a MailSword-generated email. Just visited www.mailsword.com to find out what this is about. Well, I'm not very impressed and that's because of two considerations: 1) Quote from the above website: "Before delivering message to your mailbox MailSword system politely replies (with verification request) to an unknown sender to manually verify his intent to deliver the message to you." This approach breaks the golden rule: Never reply to spam! (Why? - Because a reply to spam is likely to generate even more spam, as you confirm the validity of your email address.) My way of handling spam is silence. No reply, no reaction. Just a quick glance at it to make sure that I don't delete the one valid message of thousands of spam, and then I let it go into the void, where the minds of spammers are. 2) Another quote from that website: "MailSword software is installed on the same machine that is used as an email client (end user computer) for individual users..." If the MailSword software could communicate with the mail server _before_ downloading mail to the user's hard drive, we could talk about saved bandwidth. But as the user still have to download all messages, it's not the case. True, spam won't make it all the way to the user's email client, as the MailSword software stands between the mail server and the email client, but whether it is worth $39.95 to keep track of filtered mail flagged as spam by the MailSword software or by PowerMail's filtering capabilities (with the possible added aid of SpamSieve) is everyone's decision to make. -- Damienn _______________________________________________________________________ If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy. - Kurt Vonnegut http://hem.bredband.net/damienn _______________________________________________________________________
