SpamSieve 2.5 review
DownloadSpamSieve gives you back your inbox by bringing powerful Bayesian spam filtering to popular e-mail clients.
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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 won't confuse them with spam.
Other spam filters get worse over time as spammers adapt to their rules; SpamSieve actually gets better over time as you train it with more messages. SpamSieve doesn't delete any messages--it only marks them in your e-mail client--so you'll never lose any mail.
SpamSieve works with any number of mail accounts, of whatever types are supported by your e-mail software (e.g. POP, IMAP, Hotmail, AOL).
Here are some key features of "SpamSieve":
Powerful Bayesian spam filtering results in high accuracy and almost no false positives. It adapts to the mail that you receive to get even better with time. Some other e-mail clients include Bayesian filters, but SpamSieve is more accurate.
Integrates with your e-mail client for a superior user experience.
Integrates with the Mac OS X Address Book (and also Eudora and Entourage’s address books) so that messages from friends and colleagues are never marked as spam.
Automatically maintains a blocklist so that it can instantly adapt to spam messages sent from particular addresses, and catch 100% of them.
Automatically maintains a whitelist to guarantee that messages from particular senders or mailing lists are never marked as spam, without cluttering your address book with these addresses.
You can customize the whitelist and blocklist, adding sophisticated rules that match various message headers, or the message body. The rules can match text in a variety of ways, including using regular expressions.
Can use the Habeas Whitelist, which indicates messages that are not spam, as well as the “ADV” subject tag indicating that a message is spam.
Many spammers encode the contents of their messages so that filters cannot see the incriminating words they contain. SpamSieve can decode and look inside these messages. Optionally it can mark them all as spam, on the theory that legitimate senders do not try to obscure their messages.
SpamSieve keeps track of how accurate it is, how many good and spam messages you receive, and how these numbers change over time.
Turn off new-mail notification in your e-mail client, and let SpamSieve notify you only when you receive non-spam messages.
The corpus window and log let you see how each spam message was caught.
Limitations:
30 days trial.
Requirements:
Works with Apple Mail, Emailer, Entourage, Outlook Express, Eudora 5.2 or later (Sponsored or Paid), Mailsmith (bundled with Mailsmith 2.0.2), GyazMail 1.2 and PowerMail.
What's New:
Made lots of changes to the parser and classifiers to improve accuracy, especially for HTML and image messages.
The in-memory corpus representation is much more efficient, which should lead to lower memory use and greater speed.
Rewrote the Software Update feature. When a new version is available, it can now show you the release notes. SpamSieve now downloads the new version itself, rather than relying on your browser. On 10.3 and later, the Download & Install button will cause SpamSieve to auto-update itself to the latest version.
Improved accuracy on messages containing misspelled words.
Now requires Mac OS X 10.2.8 or later.
Auto-training now places a higher priority on corpus balance compared to learning from novel messages.
Improved the Apple Mail plug-in’s Train as Good script to work around a bug in Mail.
Improved the reliability of the Apple Mail training commands.
Made further changes to improve the success rate of the Apple Mail plug-in installer.
Updated to PCRE 6.7.
Entourage training progress messages no longer block if Entourage is in the background.
Worked around OS bug that prevented the Statistics sheet from properly parsing dates when the user’s date format started with a two-digit year.
No longer quits with an internal error if the mydefaults tool can’t be installed.
Added keyboard shortcut for Hide Others.
Fixed bug with Purchase window sheet.
Removed some old, unused code.
Updated the toolbar icons.
Various localization and documentation improvements.
Fixed bug with display of remaining demo time.
The Entourage script installer is more robust when contacting Entourage via AppleScript fails.
Improved compatibility with Leopard.
The date in the Statistics window more closely matches the user’s preferences (10.4 and later).
Better at detecting damaged corpus files (instead of crashing).
Fixed bug where Uncertain Spam growls were always sent, even if disabled in SpamSieve’s preferences.
Adjusted workaround for Help Viewer bug.
Increased the maximum width of the Hits column in rule list windows.
Added thousands separators throughout the Statistics, Corpus, and rules windows.
Fixed bug where adding a rule didn’t create a new rule if there was already a rule with a blank “Text to Match.”
Fixed rare crashing bug when performing operations during idle time.
Removed the Import Messages command (which let you train SpamSieve directly from a file in mbox format), because there are now very few situations where it is useful, and it was confusing people.
Added screenshot showing where to find Entourage scripts.
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