My Friday favorite is SpamSieve. We have mentioned it a few times previously, but since it has recently been updated to version 2.76 I wanted to sing its praises again. It's the best way I've found to deal with spam.

Using Bayesian filtering, SpamSieve installs as a plug-in to your mail client and lets you mark messages as spam. As you do, it builds a a corpus file of rules telling determining what is spam and what isn't. The more messages you mark, or train, the more accurate SpamSieve gets. I've been using it since November of 2003 and after years of training, it's so accurate that it rarely fails to catch an errant spam encrusted message. When it does, using either a keystroke sequence or a pulldown menu from your Mail client you can train it as spam.

At the start, it's quite labor intensive since you have to mark a few hundred messages for it to really start working, but it pays dividends. After a while, you'll have a personalized set of inclusion/exclusion rules that gets better over time. To give you an idea, yesterday I received 307 emails. Out of those SpamSieve correctly marked and moved over 30 messages and missed only 2 that needed training.

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.

Most desktop messaging clients (Apple's Mail.app and Microsoft's Entourage among them) give users the option to skip loading images when reading rich-formatting emails, which both speeds up the loading/reading process and limits exposure to spammer scavenging, which can leverage embedded images to verify that the evil emails were received by a valid address. The iPhone's version of Mail, however, doesn't give users the option to turn images off, as pointed out by Stefan Seiz. This has been the case all along and hasn't been corrected in 2.0, unfortunately.

While this exposure is less of a problem if you've got good spam filtering in place, it does raise an interesting question: wouldn't an optional images-off mode be ideal if you wanted to speed up your iPhone's mail performance, or (perish the thought!) limit your data usage on a less-than-ideal service plan. Unfortunately I don't think adding features and options to Mail is within the official capacity of third-party devs, so we're going to have to wait for Apple to address this directly.

The great SpamSieve was updated earlier this week to version 2.7. If you're unfamiliar with SpamSieve, you're probably inundated with unwanted email.

It's a piece of software that works with your email client and excels at squashing spam long before you ever see it. Over time, it gets better at identifying what you consider spam as well as those benign messages you want to see. Version 2.7 offers many great improvements, including:

• Several variety of accuracy improvements, focused on dealing
• Improved corpus speed and memory use
• Various improvements to the column widths and alignments
• in the rules and corpus windows, and added alternating row
• colors

There's more, of course, and you can read the rest here. While you're at it, read this tutorial for setting up a drone SpamSieve Mac. I've been running one for months and it works wonderfully.

SpamSieve 2.7 is a free update for registered users and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later.

Take Control Books, the digital delivery brainchild of long-time Mac authors Adam and Tonya Engst, has announced the publication of two new ebooks in their Take Control series.

Author Joe Kissell has written a 95-page tome titled Take Control of Apple Mail in Leopard that describes the 14 new features in the latest version of Apple Mail, details how to use its hidden power, and provides troubleshooting tips in case things don't work just the way they should. Joe's companion ebook, Take Control of Spam with Apple Mail, helps you to keep the wave of ED pharmaceutical ads in your inbox to a minimum.

The ebooks are $10 each and are downloaded immediately for your reading pleasure.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have authored two Take Control eBooks -- not this particular pair, though.

TUAW reader Simon wrote in to us, to share one of his favorite new Leopard features--and its unexpected consequences. After clicking on an All Images search, he was astonished to find any number of odd gifs and jpgs pertaining to, um, Viagra, and er, male enhancement. He quickly realized that All Images was displaying bits (and we do mean bits) from Mail's download cache. This means that although he set Mail to not download HTML images, they're getting downloaded anyway. Simple annoyance or possible security breech? You tell us in the comments.

InformationWeek reports that spam accounted for nearly 87% of e-mail traffic this year, nearly a third more than last year. And that spam wasn't all about getting you to buy V1agra and C1al1s. Quite a bit of it was phishing bait, intended to get you to hand over your personal information and passwords. If you you're unsure whether an e-mail is phishing you, choose View -> Message -> Raw Source in Mail and check out the actual URLs the e-mail is linking to. And don't forget to train your junk filter rather than just deleting unwanted items.

As our filtering technology becomes more sophisticated, so does the spam. From the InformationWeek article, "Among the more effective new techniques was the use of image-based spam, which is much harder for security software to detect than text-based spam. The former accounted for 70% of the bandwidth taken up by spam this year..." David posted a great rule-based solution this summer for image spam that may help make a dent in your inbox.

It seems that I'm not the only one being inflicted with a new wave of image spam, as Bill Benson, a MacInTouch reader, has posted his rule solution for this junk that seems to so easily elude Mail.app's filters. Tim Gaden at Hawk Wings, also a victim, elaborates on how to set up this rule, as a trick is involved. To summarize:

• for the first condition, select 'Edit Header List...'
• in its accompanying option, chose 'Content-Type' (or create it if you have to)
  
• The Content-Type option will then take first place in the rule (or you might have to select it from the criteria list), allowing you to finish building the rule as pictured

The rule is based off of Bill's observation that these spam emails always come from a different address, and the content type header (as you might now assume) begins with multipart/related'.

Since I have been receiving around a dozen of these messages on a daily basis, I think I can say that, so far, this rule has been a success. Three cheers for the power of community -based spam filtering. If you aren't using Mail.app, however, I would imagine this trick can be adapted for other email apps. Anyone else try it outside of Mail.app?

ABC News reports that Rachel Cambra bought her son an iPod from Wal-Mart for Christmas. So far this isn't all that newsworthy, but when young Cambra ripped into his iPod what did he see before him? A sparkling iPod?

Nope, some sort of mysterious meat was in the iPod packaging. The iPod package hadn't been tampered with, and the meat itself was sealed up as well.

Wal-Mart will be replacing the meat pod. Could iMeat be what Steve will be announcing at Macworld?

[via iLounge]

The one thing about updating to 10.4.1 last night that bothered me (besides Setup Assistant) was that both SpamSieve and Growl's mail bundles deactivated themselves upon launching Mail.app after reboot. Suddenly piles and piles of God-forsaken Spam was playing in the Inbox with all my other mail. Not good.

Fortunately, upon awakening this morning, I found that SpamSieve has been updated and now works with 10.4.1. If you have posted your email address across the Internet in chat rooms, discussion boards, and websites, SpamSieve will make the nightmare that is your Inbox go away (the nightmare part; not the actual Inbox). It's $25 and works with a variety of email programs, and you can find it here.

Now, I just need a Growl update, so I know when I actually receive email...