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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.

Flip4Mac allows you to play Windows Media files (.wma and .wmv) directly in QuickTime Player and view Windows Media content on the Internet using a Web browser. You used to have to pay for this but nows it’s a free download.

Hurrah, the first official release of NeoOffice/J was released today. I have downloaded it and will try it out over the next few weeks. I am hoping I will finally be able to stop using the donkey that is Office2004 for Mac. I used to use OpenOffice when I ran Fedora and loved it. NeoOffice/J is a native version of OpenOffice.

Well, I lasted a day before I had to go out and get Apple’s latest offering. After reading endless articles I had to see it for myself, and I must say, first impressions are good. You can’t necessarily see the quoted 200 new features but the most talked up ones I’m finding useful. I actually think the nicest thing, and something I didn’t expect was that my Powerbook is now running faster, I actually expected the opposite.

Spotlight is really very nice. I used quicksilver before and didn’t really use it to it’s full capabilities. All I really use it for was to search for files (duh, really) and to open apps without having to hunt them down. Spotlight allows me to do this.

Dashboard I love. I have been playing with this a lot and hope to have a few widgets up and running soon. I guess I like this so much because the way widgets are constructed is using the kind of web based structures I have to deal with on a day to day basis. Not to say that they can’t go a lot further than that, but for me it means I can see something working straight away.

I am yet to try Automator but I’m sure there are many things it will be able to do that will make life easier. I was thinking things like creating thumbnails, resizing images in batches, automated backups of specific stuff (maybe zipping up important data and emailing it to my Gmail account for safe storage), the list is endless.

In fact the only thing I wasn’t into is the new icons in Mail. Too small and fidelity. I’m sure someone will come up with an alternative soon.

So in short Tiger is proving great. I no doubt will write more about it as I find it out from playing around and hearing things from friends. In the mean time I can only advise Apple users to go get it now.