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Charles Moore Reviews POPmonitor 2.1 Email Utility
Spam is definitely getting worse. My Applelinks email account gets bombarded with 25-40 spam messages per day, despite fairly aggressive stance filters on the incoming server. My MacOpinion and Low End Mac email boxes get plenty as well. An inevitable consequence of having the addresses published on Webpages And not only is there more spam, it’s also getting bigger. A couple of years ago, spam messages with attachments were relatively uncommon. Now it seems about half of the junk meal has attachments or heavy graphical formatting -- a particular plague when you are on a slow dial up connection like I am. The past couple of months have been especially bad. There are a number of the anti-spam strategies and workarounds. Some email clients are incorporating spam filters. OS X Mail has this feature, and it reportedly works quite well, but I don’t use the Mail app., as I need transparent email file compatibility with OS 9 versions of my email clients. Nisus Email lets you preview email header information and delete unwanted messages without downloading them, which is a great blessing, but filtering doesn’t work at the preview level. 
However, for the past month or so I’ve been using POPMonitor on my Applelinks email account, which I manage with Eudora. POPMonitor is a cool little shareware email utility, available in both OS X and Classic versions, that allows you to not only preview the contents of your email boxes before downloading, but also to instantly create blocking filters that can automatically delete subsequent messages from blocked addresses without even previewing them. You can also “bounce” previewed messages that you what return to sender. 
Unfortunately, quite a few of the fake bounces bounce right back at you, but I figure it’s still worth a shot if one has a few spare moments, if only to give you the satisfaction of fighting back. When first you launch POPmonitor, the Configuration Assistant will help you configure your first account. Then you just login to your mailbox, select the unwanted messages and click “Block” (and “Bounce” if desired) and then ‘Delete’. You can configure POPMonitor to automatically delete messages from blocked senders. or automatically delete messages that match any filter, and set POPmonitor to switch directly to your e-mail application after it has checked and filtered your mailbox. POPmonitor will first remove any unwanted messages from your mailbox and then tell your e-mail application to receive the remaining messages. 
You can display selected messages in separate windows. POPmonitor will not show the entire message but just downloaded part of it. You can specify the size of the downloaded part in the Account Settings window under Read X lines of the message body. You can also save selected messages to your hard disk using POPMonitor alone. To bounce messages, click the bounce button, and the the selected message(s) will be sent back to the sender thereby simulating a non-existing e-mail address. POPmonitor will send a message saying that your e-mail account no longer exists on your ISP’s server. POPmonitor can also act as an automatic filter between your ISP’s mailbox and your email application, check and filter your mailbox at scheduled intervals and afterwards instruct your email application to receive the remaining messages. Creating filters In POPMonitor is easy: select Filters from the Edit menu to open the Filters overview window, then click the Add button to create a new filter. Give the filter a name, select the appropriate criteria from the pop up menus and enter keywords or a Regular Expression in the text fields. There is also a selection of ready-made filters that can be downloaded from the POPMonitor Website. See Appendix 2 below for a list. For more information on configuring and using POPMonitor, see Appendix 1 below. After about a month of adding spam addresses to POPMonitor’s blocked address database, it is very satisfying to see that incoming messages are being automatically deleted with ever mail check. I’ve found POPMonitor rock-stable and generally unbuggy so far. The only glitch I’ve noticed is that sometimes when you hide POPMonitor, any open window closes, and you have to reopen it when you return to the application. 
As usual with software that has OS X and Classic versions that do essentially the same thing, the Classic version is significantly faster than the OS X version. Other than that, they work pretty much identically. You can use the same registration code for both the MacOS 8/9 version and the MacOS X version. By and large POPMonitor works great, and there’s nothing else quite like it. System requirements: POPMonitor includes a 19-page user’s manual and troubleshooting guide in PDF format. POPmonitor is $25.00 shareware.ĘThe unregistered version of POPmonitor lets you create one mail account, three trusted senders, three blocked senders and three custom filters. After registering you can create an unlimited number of each. For more information, visit: Appendix 1 Configuring And Using POPMonitor In the Scheduling and Filtering configuration panel, you can specify details regarding automatic mail checking and filtering: In the Notification panel you specify details about notification when your mailbox contains new mail and details about your e-mail application. In the Miscellaneous panel you specify general application settings. Every account configured has its own account window displaying the contents of the corresponding e-mail account. You can show or hide the toolbar by clicking the Toolbar widget in the upper right corner, by pressing Command-T or by selecting Show/Hide toolbar from the Window menu. Toolbar Buttons: • Check connects to your ISP’s mail server and gets an overview of mail currently waiting in your mailbox. POPmonitor does not download messages completely. Instead just a part of each message is downloaded. You can specify the size of the downloaded part in the Account Settings window. • Receive switches to your e-mail application and tell it to receive waiting mail You can select Trusted senders or Blocked senders from the Edit menu to add, update or delete trusted or blocked senders. Mail from trusted senders always appears in your mailbox marked with a green dot. Mail sent by these persons is never affected by filters. Mail from blocked senders either appears in your mailbox marked with a red dot or is deleted automatically while POPmonitor checks the mailbox. Go to the Account Settings window The Add button adds a new e-mail address to the list. After clicking this button the E The Update button allows you to change the selected e-mail address. The Delete button deletes the selected e-mail addresses. To create a filter, select Filters from the Edit menu. A filter can have a maximum of two criteria and mail that meets a certain filter’s criteria can either be trusted, flagged or deleted automatically. The filter action can be set to Trust, Delete, Flag orFlag/Delete (account preference): Clicking the Read button when one or more messages are selected or double-clicking a single message will open each message in a separate window. Bouncing mail sends an e-mail back to the sender saying “This e-mail address does not exist”. This is intended to make the spammer believe your e-mail address no longer exists. The desired effect is that the sender will now remove your address from Bouncing sounds as the perfect solution to get rid of spam but unfortunately this is not Appendix 2 Ready-made filters Adult Attachments Countries Encoded mail Financial/Business Returned mail Trusted sources Viruses Miscellaneous
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