spamsieve posts

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.

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.

Somebody call the ambulance, because .Mac is dying...and Google is the assassin (with a little help from his sidekick Firefox). Now I've been using .Mac since it was free and called "iTools." I was initially lured in by the convenience of iDisk, the mac.com email address and so on. Web bookmark and contact syncing are also super-convenient, and as time passed I made use of some of the other .Mac services, like iCal publishing and so on. Everything was fine. Not free anymore, but fine. Then Google introduced (free) Gmail with oodles more storage than .Mac offers, calendars and so on. To make a long story short, I'm about to give .Mac the boot for good. After the jump, a breakdown of why.

Today, SpamSieve has been updated to version 2.4.1. For the uninitiated, SpamSieve is a customizable spam filtering application for Mac email clients, including Mail, Mailsmith, Entourage, PowerMail, and Eudora. As the title suggests, this version is a universal binary. Other changes in version 2.4.1 included:

• Various changes have been made to the application's HTML parser to improve accuracy.
• Filtering of messages containing attachments has been improved
  
• Added Apple Mail settings to control whether messages trained as spam are marked as read and/or left on the server.
• Better at finding notification sounds that are built into mail clients.

You can purchase a single license of SpamSieve for $25US, and it requires Mac OS X 10.2.8 or later (10.3.5 or later recommended).