Friday Favorite: SpamSieve 2.76

My biggest problem is my mobileMe/.mac account. I do a lot of business and have to give this email account out regularly. As you can imagine, I get an incredible amount of SPAM, and if FLOODS my iPhone's email notifier relentlessly.

I really need help. I can set up a client side solution on my Macbook, but that's not really a problem. MobileMe's server side spam blocking is practically non-existent!

I saw someone mention sending it through gmail, good idea?

Even though I don't see how it's possible, SpamSieve seems to have deleted my server-side JUNK mail folders. I am not sure what the side effect of that is, but I guess I will find out in the next few days.

Me too, but decent isn't good enough for me and the volume of email that I receive.

David, If I'm understanding you correctly, you've been using the product since 2003, and yet even yesterday you still had to go through your spam bin and recover two emails that were incorrectly identified as spam.

Spam filtering is great, and there have been important advances (especially Gmail and some others as mentioned previously), but if after creating rules for SIX YEARS you still are getting false positives every day and still have to search through your spam bin, that doesn't really speak well for the product. IMHO

Can you clarify if it did let two spams through as legitimate or were two legitimate messages filtered as SPAM?

I'd be tolerant of two SPAMs getting through once in a while, based on some new trick; but after using it since 2003 and countless trained messages missing two legitimate messages would frustrate me enormously. Trolling through SPAM to find legitimate messages is a waste time.

Spam seems to come in waves. I go months without much and then some new trick gets past the providers and I get loads. SpamSieve takes the work out of those times.

"Supported clients are Apple Mail, Claris Emailer (that takes me back), ..."

you think THAT takes you back? how about that icon? It looks like the last survivor of eWorld...

I tend to agree with the view that programs like SpamSieve are much less relevant than they used to be. I have used SpamSieve for several years now and it is a great product that has filtered out a lot of garbage over that time, but when I look at my junk folder now there's virtually no spam in it as my email providers are now doing a much better job of filtering my mail than they did in the past. That said if you do still have an issue with spam, then I also recommend SpamSieve.

Instead of SpamSieve, I am a fan of SpamSweep, which is similar: a way to check all your email accounts regularly and remove spam, according to a single set of rules. Highly recommended:

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

I've used SpamSieve since 2006 and as a web site administrator of multiple sites and having several personal email accounts as well with client access all over tarnation I would not be getting much peace of mind relying on the inconsistent and not in my control operation of server-based spam filtering. SpamSieve has been a life saver and it has at 99%+ accuracy rate with me now. Sure if you have a couple of email accounts through a major and competent mail hosting provider that may be enough but I need to know what's being filtered and with easy access to adding and subtracting filtered email.

No I don't think client-side filters are obsolete and if you are a BIG email user SpamSieve is the way to go.