SpamSieve saves my sanity
Now spam is just a fact of email, and up until now my Mail‘s apps junk mail filter used to be pretty good, so much so that I never really thought about it. The problem started a few months ago when spam started slipping though the junk mail filter and into my inbox. I guess the cretins that manage these spam-gun machines that send out this crap found a new avenue to exploit.
So I hunted around and found a possible app that could improve things called SpamSieve. I’ve had this running for a few weeks now (there is a free 30 day trial period), and I have to say it has been fantastic! The amount of spam in my inbox is more or less nothing now, amazing.
SpamSieve adds bayesian filtering and runs instead of Mail’s junk mail filter. You start by giving it a bunch of emails that are junk and then a bunch of emails that are good and it monitors them, then it continues by monitoring everything that comes in and starts to build up a knowledge of what’s right and wrong. This means that even though it is behaving well now, it will hopefully get better. Here’s a little example of the stats since I started using the app:
Filtered Mail 153 Good Messages 336 Spam Messages (69%) 32 Spam Messages Per Day SpamSieve Accuracy 5 False Positives 14 False Negatives (74%) 96.1% Correct Corpus 258 Good Messages 402 Spam Messages (61%) 30,121 Total Words Rules 263 Blocklist Rules 610 Whitelist Rules Showing Statistics Since 12/11/2006 11:27
So you can see that it’s 96.1% accurate at the moment which I have to say it good enough for me for the time being. The app also comes with great documentation and is able to run with all the popular email client. I’d be interested to here about other people’s success with this app or others.
