I had an experience with Mailwasher recently which produced some unexpected results, so I'll post it here in case someone else can benefit.

A lot of you were probably affected by the 'mail floods' of August and September, which seemed to have been caused by Klez or Swen infected machines.  Actually, it's quite possible that some of these infected PC's belong to list members, so I'd suggest that everyone double-check their machines to make sure they're clean.

Anyway, during the deluge, it became a daily routine to vet the 300-400 emails I was receiving with Mailwasher, and Blacklist them as I went.

However, after a number of these blacklisted addresses continued to generate mail, I set Mailwasher to 'Autodelete Blacklisted Messages', which stopped repeats and saved a lot of time and mouse clicks.

Eventually, the floods of mail stopped, probably because the virus had been programmed to cease operating in early September.

But in October, the PCSoft and PCBuild mailing list servers began deleting my subscription.  To avoid cluttering their system with lapsed subscriptions that haven't been officially discontinued, they're set so as to allow only 24 hours of bounced emails and then the offending subscription is removed.

This is what was happening with my subscription - I'd resubscribe and then get unsubscribed again - it happened three times with each server, making six in total.

After a lot of headscratching and discussions with Bob Wright and my ISP, it occurred to me to change my Mailwasher settings back to the default.  

As soon as I changed the setting, I began again to see incoming messages marked as 'Blacklisted'. 

But to my surprise, I realised that most of them were valid PCSoft and PCBuild list addresses.  Obviously, during the mail blitz, I'd blindly and rapidly marked them as 'bad' because they were showing up as virus carriers, but because of the 'autodelete blacklisted mail' setting, I didn't get an opportunity to review the status of these addresses when the heat came off.

So - be careful with automatic settings like this in Mailwasher and other programs - they can cause unexpected and unwanted results.

Ian Porter
Computer Guys Inc.
Arrowtown
New Zealand
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