Monday, February 18, 2002		Downloads of the week

EmC (E-mail Control) is an anti-spam tool that allows you to reduce the number of junk mails arriving in your inbox. The program works with a combination of filters, that can be customised by the user and checks the mail while it is still on your ISPs server. Based on your filter criteria, it will process the mail and optionally delete all spam or mark it for deletion. EmC also works as an e-mail checker, allowing you to view messages on the server, before doing any delete actions. In addition you can check your mail for any script-based viruses or other hazards before downloading it to your computer. New filters can be easily added and the program comes equipped with a large list of presets. Its other features include Read and filter all e-mail header messages found in the POP3 boxes, delete the selected messages right from the server, answer the senders of unsolicited e-mail with a standard message (designed by the user), verify the possible presence of attachment viruses using our filters, maintain the Anti-Spam Black List of the non-desired senders, organise the statistics of your e-mail acceptance and deletion, find sender owner domain in the registration domain database, discover the spammers messages and show the message body in the exclusive "Browser Stylus". This is how it works. EmC 5.0 reads the headers of the messages directly in the server, listing, filtering and marking them for deletion. The user chooses the messages to be deleted via check boxes. The default to read body is less than 50 KB. The user can set filtering criteria for all received messages by: sender, subject, header, body, favourites list, existence of sender's domain, anti-spam black list, and attachment verification. The program verifies the presence of attachments to the message and initiates filter virus scanning. It also verifies all e-mail accounts in your computer and brings them without password. Only what you do is put your password account in the main account window. You will find this freeware here: www.abreuretto.com/anti-spam

Poppy for Windows is a small utility that you can use on the Windows PC to be notified when you have mail waiting for you on the POP3 server of your Internet provider (or Internet providers). Poppy can check multiple POP3 servers and check for new messages at regular time intervals. Once you have started the program, you will see a little icon in the so-called system tray or taskbar notification area. When it detects that mail is available on any of the configured POP3 servers, it will let you know by changing the little icon into an open envelope. Optionally, Poppy can also play a sound or popup a little notification window. It was designed to be as small and simple as possible, while providing with enough features to check for e-mail messages on a regular basis. It can display a simple popup menu when you click on the little icon in the taskbar notification area with the right mouse button. The 'Check Now' menu item will force Poppy to check all configured POP3 servers for mail messages. You can use this item if you want to check your mail before the normal interval has expired. You can also double-click the little icon in the taskbar notification area to check your POP3 servers immediately. The 'Last Status' menu item will re-display the status window that was displayed the last time that Poppy checked the POP3 servers. The 'Mail Program' menu item will start the mail program that you have configured using the Options dialog. This will allow you to start your favourite mail program. The 'Accounts' menu item will display a popup menu containing all names of the accounts. This will allow you to quickly enable or disable an account, which can be useful when an account has been offline for a while. The 'Enabled' menu item will allow you to quickly enable or disable Poppy. When this program is disabled, it will stop checking the POP3 servers periodically. The 'Options' menu item will display the Options dialog, which will allow you to configure it. Download from: www.yoursurfice.com

Cacheman is a utility designed to improve the performance of your computer by optimising the disk cache, memory and a number of other settings. It is able to prevent frequent paging to the hard disk, resulting in improved performance, system reaction time and stability. Wizards and predefined profiles make it suitable for novices and yet it is also powerful and versatile enough for the more experienced user. The program also corrects generic problems on systems with more than 512MB of RAM. If you launch Cacheman for the first time, you will see the Overview page of the Info section. The lowest and highest values are recorded only while Cacheman is running, so at this time they will not differ much from the current usage. Disk Cache and 16-bit resources information is available on Windows 95,98 and Me systems only. You can switch between the nine different Cacheman pages using the navigation bar located to the right of the program window. Most pages have Help or Wizard buttons. You may use them to learn more about its functionality and change settings to fine-tune your system's performance. If you do not have the time or knowledge to manipulate the settings you can of course try one of the predefined profiles. Most settings require a system reboot for the changes to take effect. Cacheman saves your original system settings on first startup in a Profile named "Initial Settings." You can safely revert to your original settings by loading this profile. By default, the program starts automatically with Windows and minimises itself to the System tray. Double-click the icon in the tray to view the main window. You can disable the automatic launch feature by deselecting Load Cacheman on Windows startup in the Options section, if you do not need Cacheman's monitoring or Memory Recovery abilities. Download of this freeware is available from: www.outertech.com

— Raman Mohan