Monday, August 25, 2003		Downloads

SPAM is currently the biggest nuisance on the Net. Anti-spam tools are a hot selling item, but these cost a lot. We feature in this column a freeware anti-spam-tool that can help you delete spam at the server itself rather than download it in your client. The other features freeware lets you know the size of any file you wish to download. This can help you plan whether you want it right now or later or not at all. Both are useful utilities.

Mail Box Dispatcher

This utility allows you to control incoming e-mail messages on the server side. You can delete unwanted messages from your mailboxes without downloading them. Mail Box Dispatcher has many features. It doesn’t download the entire message. Instead it will download only information about message (From, To, Subject and Size). It can download some message lines also (you choose number of lines to preview). You can delete messages mainly spam from server without downloading them. It has a built-in auto-selection rules that let you setup Mail Box Dispatcher to auto-select unwanted messages. Five different types of rules: Sender, Recipient, Subject, Body, Friends and fast adding of new rules transform this tool into a powerful anti-spam weapon. No one can detect whether an incoming message is spam or not with the same accuracy as you. Mail Box Dispatcher makes many operations unmanned, but the last click remains yours. Auto-selection rules let you teach Mail Box Dispatcher to auto-select unwanted messages. After the program has received list of messages from server and made previews, it starts auto-selection procedure. This procedure searches for presence of rules-substrings in each message and if it finds any substring, then message is selected as unwanted. Search area depends on the type of rule. Sender-rules have ‘From-field’ search area. This means that Mail Box Dispatcher searches for presence of From-rules in From string of all messages.

Recipient-rules and Subject-rules do the same things for To and Subject strings. Search area for Body-rules is preview of message (message header and some message lines - number of message lines you choose in ‘Setup Mail’). Friend-rules have other meaning. Friend-rules have ‘From-field’ search area. If Mail Box Dispatcher finds Friend-substring then this message will be not selected in any case. In short, this extremely useful freeware these days when most mailboxes are being flooded by spam. Download from www.anti-spam-tools.com

GetFileSize

This is an easy-to-use utility that allows you to find out the size of a file before downloading it. Right-click a link in Internet Explorer and select Get File Size, this will open GetFileSize window where you will see the file’s name, size and last modification date. If you’re connected to the Internet through a proxy then you might need to configure the connection properties. Click "Menu..." and then select "Connection Properties." Here you can also set a username and a password for the website that requires login.

The information about a file is provided by the server where the file is located. If the server doesn’t want to provide file size or modification date, then there’s no way to get it otherwise. Happily, 90 per cent of web sites do provide this information. Download is available at www.unhsolutions.net