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Frank Petrie looks at SpamSieve spam filtering software with Bayesian spam filtering
When Monty Python sings about it, I can't get enough of it. But spam has become such a nuisance, that even Congress is looking into it, which is pretty ironic as Congress is a nuisance itself.
"SpamSieve gives you back your inbox by bringing powerful Bayesian spam filtering to popular e-mail clients. It learns what your spam looks like, so it can block nearly all of it. It looks at your address book and learns what your good messages look like, so it wonÕt confuse them with spam..."
Let's see.
"Drag this file into your Applications folder." Simple, intuitive UI - but do not be fooled. To get the most out of this app, you're going to have to do a little configuring. But as it is only the one time, it's not that bad ...
SS works with Apple Mail, Emailer, Entourage, Eudora 5.2 or later (sponsored or paid), Mailsmith and PowerMail. It utilizes powerful Bayesian spam filtering which results, according to its author, in higher accuracy and almost no false positives. Which means that it adapts to the mail that you receive to get even better with time.
It also integrates with the Mac OS X Address Book (as well as Eudora's and EntourageÕs address books) so that friendly messages are never marked as spam. You can customize the whitelist and blocklist, adding sophisticated rules that match various message headers or the message body. It also honors Habeas headers indicating that a message is not spam, as well as the ÒADVÓ subject tag indicating that a message is spam.
And with SS, you can keep track of how accurate is, how many good and spam messages you receive, how these numbers change over time and its success percentage from one pane!
Currently, let's say that you leave trashed messages on the server for seven days before automatically deleting them. Each time Mail goes to get your latest messages, it downloads all your spam that is remaining on the server. This issue only affects Apple Mail and it only applies to POP accounts (not .Mac or IMAP). The author is in the process of developing a workaround for the Mail bug, and some users have tried the current beta with success.
I must say in its defense, though, that it has always distinguished which is which correctly.
I thought that I had more friends.
Welcome to the junk mail for the new millennium. Spam will always be with us; be it via email, pop-up ads, what have you. So any tool that can help sift through the daily deluge is welcome. SpamSieve has a fully-featured free trial (30 days or 20 launches). Download it, give it a spin and see if it's right for you.
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