New forum for my MailWasher Pro Custom Spam Filters
As many of you know, I write and publish custom spam filters for the anti-spam program named MailWasher Pro. In addition to publishing my custom MailWasher Pro filters on my own website, I have a thread about them on the new Firetrust MailWasher Forum. The title and location is: Wizcrafts Custom MailWasher Pro Filters discussed here.
For the curious who are not yet using MailWasher Pro, you can read about it on my MailWasher Pro web page. There are links there to try it or buy it. There is a one time fee of $39.95 US to license the program and all updates to the program itself are then free for life. It does have an included reporting service called FirstAlert! that is subscription based, but is purely optional. All new purchasers get the first year of FirstAlert! for free.
The spam filters used by MailWasher Pro (MWP) are in plain test and are stored in a file named: filters.txt. That file, along with the blacklist (and friends list), the bayesian learning filter database and other personalized files are stored separately from the program itself, inside your user profile, under Application Data, or AppData for Vista users. That location depends on which version of Windows you are using. If you don't already know about the location of your application data, open the Run box by pressing the "Windows" key + R together and when the Run box opens, type in : %AppData% and press Enter. If you are notified that the contents are hidden, click on the link to Show these files, and/or modify your Folder View options to Display hidden files and folders and to not hide known file type extensions.
Once you open your personal identity's Application Data (or AppData) directory, look for the MailWasherPro subdirectory. Your own filters.txt and blacklist.txt files, spamlog.txt and the learning filter database are all inside that location. To edit filters.txt, or to use my custom downloadable filters you must first close MailWasher Pro, or your changes will be overwritten.
Some things to keep in mind when editing filters.txt are as follows:
- Every rule starts with either [enabled] or [disabled]
- Every rule starts on a new line and occupies one long line of code.
- you must not have any blank spaces after the end of any rule.
- There must not be any blank lines between rules.
- MWP will add a single line feed to the last rule if none is present in your custom filters.
- Comments are proceeded with double forward slashes: // and will be overwritten with the default comments after the program opens and closes.
- Pay careful attention to double quotes (") in your rules. A misplaced quote will cause that rule to be deleted when the program opens! If there are spaces between words or regular expressions, you must enclose that segment inside double quotes. If there are bouble quotes in the rule you must add another double quote to each one, thus "escaping" them.
- If in doubt you should use the custom filter wizard to add data to fields and select your desired actions. The wizard will add the necessary quotes for you and the correct terminology for matching conditions. You can then open your filters.txt and see how the rule looks in the list.
My latest additions to the custom filters and sample filters are in my Custom MailWasher Pro filters. If you are thinking about purchasing MailWasher Pro, I would appreciate it if you do so through my MailWasher Pro affiliate link. Thank you!
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