Drowning in a sea of spam? Spamsweep can help

First things first: as a new blogger around here, let me introduce myself. Hi, I'm Mel Martin. I spent most of my life as a journalist, then moved over to the technology side. I spent 4 years at the BBC working on creating a content management system.

I'm an avid amateur astronomer and have published many images taken from my home observatory. I've also written a book about film producer Samuel Bronston, who created epic films like El Cid, Fall of the Roman Empire, King of Kings and 55 Days at Peking. I participated in the recent DVD releases of two of the Bronston films, and shared in doing the commentary on the Fall of the Roman Empire DVD released in April. I've had Macs since 1984, the Apple II before that. Glad to be here, and hope I can share some interesting posts with you. And here we go....

There are lots of applications out there to deal with spam, but many run within or alongside the mail client itself, and that can be problematic when you are away from home and using limited bandwidth -- you still have to download all the mail in order for your local filters to process it. My ISP offers POP mail, and does some filtering on the server side, but 30-40 spams still get through every day.

Spamsweep from Bains Software offers a nice solution that has largely gone unnoticed, although there was a brief mention of it here in 2005. Now, for people with iPhones or other smartphones, it is even more useful. Spamsweep is a small app that displays an icon in your menu bar. In my situation, it runs on my Mac Pro desktop at home, checking my mail account(s) once a minute. It downloads the spam, and leaves the good mail alone, ready to pass it on to any device while I am on the road, connected via a laptop or cell phone. The spam gets trapped and goes to spam heaven (or hell).

You can train it, of course, and go back through the list of spam to correct any errors, but there are darned few of them. A nice side benefit is that it keeps the spam off my iPhone. It works with several mail clients including Apple Mail, Eudora, Entourage, Mailsmith, Powermail and Thunderbird. Those connections to your mail app are important only if you want Spamsweep to launch your mail client after it checks for spam. I don't use it in that mode, so Spamsweep quietly spends the day obediently checking my POP mail account and cleaning out the garbage. It is great when I travel, and when I get home I can check to see if there are any good messages (false positives) that got trapped. That almost never happens; if Spamsweep is unsure, it passes the mail through.

Support from the company has been very good, and there are usually a few updates per year adding some features and tightening up the code. It's a great solution for keeping spam vanquished when you travel, and really keeps your iPhone (or lesser device) clean.

Of course, a spam message could sneak in if your phone checks your mail server right before Spamsweep has done its check, but in the real world I only see that happen a couple of times a week, and of course during that week Spamsweep has snagged hundreds of messages I never want to see.

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Source: http://www.bainsware.com/spamsweep/

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First things first: as a new blogger around here, let me introduce myself. Hi, I'm Mel Martin. I spent most of my life as a journalist,...

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Daniel

Nice post. But why let the spam get even that far in the first place? If you have a good (read: non-free) email account and cooperative web host (I admit, those are two big pre-reqs), use a service like "Spam Stops Here" to filter it at the MX level...aka, before it even hits your mail server.

Then there is nothing running on your computer (so it will filter if your computer loses power somehow), it will filter all mail and all protocols (IMAP and POP), and it requires no input from you (they update it 24/7).

I don't work for them, but I have experience with their service and couldn't be happier with it...works better than anything else Ive tried.

December 06 2008 at 2:42 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Steve B.

I have an extremely public email address (I manage several mail lists and it has also been out on websites in open form for a long time) that has become a spam magnet over the 10 years I have been using it. I have been using SpamSweep for nearly two years, and can't imagine life or email without it. All my incoming mail is pre-filtered before passed on to my mail client (Entourage at present, but I have used Mail and Thunderbird) with a microscopically small number of false positives/negatives, all of which are available for review.

The Bayesian database has learned quickly and well, and the simple rules builder allows me to create special case filtering.

December 06 2008 at 1:57 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Hunter

How do you get rid of the icon in the dock?! you said it was only in the menu bar....

December 06 2008 at 11:36 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

oshawapilot

Another suggestion for Gmail, either directly, or as a filter.

Spam is a complete non issue for me anymore, and has been off my radar for the last 2 years I've been a Gmail user.

December 06 2008 at 8:45 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Maxintech

Tuaw: Please fix your search engine. The message "could not open XML input" has been for ages.

December 06 2008 at 7:55 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

daenney

Ever since McColo was shut down the amount of spam I receive has drastically decreased. That said, spam still arrives but SpamAssasin coupled with the Mail.app jiunkfilter has been able to keep everything out of my inbox so far.

A lot of hosting providers actually check their mail with SpamAssasin, you might want to have a look at the full headers of your mail message to confirm that and create an additional rule in Mail.app so that messages with a SpamAssasin score of 5 and higher get treated as Junk too, that can solve a lot of problems.

December 06 2008 at 6:35 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

alanwestenbroek

Welcome to TUAW, Mel! You and I worked together in one of our previous lives, and I often wonder where you got to.

You'll be glad to know I switched to Mac a year ago last week. I credit your influence. :)

December 06 2008 at 5:14 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Rafe H.

The '90s called, they want their POP back.

December 06 2008 at 12:12 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Rafe H.'s comment

tdowling

I totally don't get how some ISPs don't offer IMAP. The massive Comcast, for one. Isn't POP a greater strain on mail servers?

December 06 2008 at 12:55 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Stephen.4

Welcome home? Haha. I especially liked the "...and really keeps your iPhone (or lesser device) clean. " part. :)

December 05 2008 at 10:47 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Clark

I just use IMAP for my account and then leave my home iMac running so that it can (a) run my rules to put incoming mail in the proper directories and (b) run SpamSieve which will route the spam. Although for (b) you could just use the spam filter built into Mail.app.

December 05 2008 at 10:03 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply