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Filed under: Software, Cool tools, Friday Favorite

Friday Favorite: SpamSieve 2.76

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.

This is a shot of my corpus screen showing how many messages have been filtered and how many words were read resulting in messages being regarded as spam or good. Yes, over 15,000 messages is a big number, but by being cumulative, SpamSieve gets more and more accurate over time. SpamSieve allows you to import or export the corpus file so if you get a new computer, or decide to use a different email client, you lose nothing.

Continue readingFriday Favorite: SpamSieve 2.76

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To get an instant map to any address, just go to your Address Book and right click on the address field of any one of your contacts and select "Map Of." The address will then be revealed in Google Maps on Safari. You can do the same if a data detector determines there is an address in an e-mail in Mail.


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