SpamNullifier

I am so angry right now at this piece of garbage software. I use a fine email service called Fastmail.fm, that offers free IMAP email. It is a great service but I wanted a good spam filter for it, because this previously clean email address started getting garbage mail. I decided to try SpamNullifier tonight. Upon installation, it appears to be similar to Mailwasher. I use an old version of Mailwasher, back when it was free and filtered Hotmail accounts. It isn't perfect, but it works well. At any rate, I started up SpamNullifier, felt comfortable with it because it has an interface similar to what I'm accustomed to and looks intuitive to use. Not to mention it is free. Sounds too good to be true. I enter in my account information and let it scan the account. Big mistake.

Why? Because as a default, SpamNullifier is set to delete emails that it considers old (over a month old). Did I ask it to do that? I don't want to delete old mails. I downloaded this program because I wanted it to manage spam. I also wanted the option to preview the deletions first. I didn't think this asinine program would act like it had free reign over my account. It went ahead and deleted 263 emails of mine. This was an account I use for computer newsletters and such, so there was a lot of valuable information there, but nothing personal that couldn't be replaced. Nonetheless, imagine my horror to find that literally hundreds of emails were deemed "too old" and were automatically deleted. What dumb software engineer thought it would be a good idea to turn on the "delete old mail" option by default? What moron thought their program was so great that human intervention was not required, that it should go ahead and do whatever it felt was best? I would seriously like to punch that idiot (or collective of idiots) right now. Needless to say, this piece of software is not dirtying my hard drive for even an hour. I would not recommend this to anyone.

However, my story is not done. For those of you who know how IMAP email works, bear with me. When you delete an IMAP email from your account, it is not really gone until you "purge" it. In other words, your email is striked out, but is still accessible until you hit the purge button. But SpamNullifier, in all it's wisdom, bypasses all these unnecessary safety precautions and purges it all for you. Gone. Vanished. I didn't realize what had happened till I viewed all the emails in the account (and here I was, thinking it would do me some good to put an email in the "friends" category. I thought it would then be safe to check email. I saw all of these "deleted" messages under the status column. "Deleted? Why?" Because they are "Old Messages." Reading the manual (yeah, should have done that before, I know, but who designs software that takes irreversible actions?), I found that supposedly, all emails deleted are restorable. OK, fine. I try to view the deleted messages. Blank. I see no obvious way to restore them (no option available anywhere I looked, and no instructions in the manual for restoration. Fine. I go to where I installed the stupid program. Ah, there they are, under a folder called "Mails." Ok, let's open up one of these files. Blank? WTF? Almost every single one of the 263 emails are empty, excepts some random (and useless) html commands, namely, the <br> command. Only six emails, out of all of those, are available to me. They are gone. There is nothing I can do. I have looked at undelete programs to find the original dbx files and try to restore them, but didn't get anything useful. Nada. I HATE this program!

Other nitpicks, just for good measure. I hate how I cannot hide the "friends" emails, so that I can deal with just the potential spam. I cannot see any option that lets me do this (except to look at deleted emails). You are not allowed to order the list of emails by sender, date, size, or any other category, despite having all those categories available. The documentation doesn't warn you of anything, nor does it explain simple operations. I realize this is the free version, and you get what you pay for, but Arrghh! This does not make me want to convert to the Pro version. There is no way these people are getting any of my money, ever. In fact, I would be happy if I can turn everyone else away from this horrid product. Do not touch it. Do not taint your inbox with its filth. Send them nasty emails, if you feel like it. Yes, I should have backed up my emails first, and yes, I should have read the manual first (so that there would be no excuses, not because it would have explained anything useful!), but they still messed up! Their business does not deserve any support. They should be getting coal in their stocking this Christmas. Bad SpamNullifier!

Oh, P.S. Remember those 6 emails that were still there? Most programs, when they are uninstalled will leave small tracks in the form of personalized files on your hard drive, so that if you reinstall the program, you can pick up where you left off, so to speak, and not have to repersonalize that software. A game, for instance, will often leave your saved games on the hard drive, in case you reinstall and want to play again. Not SpamNullifier. When it was uninstalled, it took everything. I guess the thing that bothers me most about this crummy piece of software is that it has done nothing the way I would have expected. I have been installing software for a long time (I have been playing with computers since the mid-eighties and know more than the average bear). The losers that designed SpamNullifier broke all of the conventions for writing software, and they expect people to be happy about it. BOO! HISS!