Over the past couple of years, my daily load of spam has increased to well over 200 messages a day. It had become apparent that the spam filters in Apple Mail simply weren’t up to the task of weeding out much of the junk rolling in.
A few days ago, after deleting a very large batch of spam, I searched for a way to solve the spam problem without forcing all of my contacts to go through a convoluted authorization process. That’s when I discovered SpamSieve for the Mac.
SpamSieve works with Apple Mail (and several other email programs) to do one thing: filter out the spam. The installation process itself for SpamSieve is a bit convoluted, but there are detailed step-by-step instructions. The program is downloaded and installed in the normal manner, but then there’s a plugin to install. While this is a simple point and click operation, it’s too bad SpamSieve can’t automatically load the plugin.
There’s also the issue of changing the default Junk mailbox. Again, these steps aren’t terribly complex, but from a user’s standpoint, it seems they could be automated.
The training process is actually quite easy. You simply mark messages as “good” or “spam” and the program does the rest. Because I had a huge number of emails to use in the initial training, SpamSieve became accurate very quickly. By the end of the second day, there were no spam messages that made it past the program, but there were a few emails incorrectly identified as spam. After marking those messages as “good”, the accuracy improved further and by the end of the third day, SpamSieve was accurate about 98% of the time.
One of the biggest complaints I get when doing scam presentations is that people are inundated with junk email. SpamSieve will set me back about $30, but if it tames my inbox and lets me breeze through my mail, I’ll consider that money well spent. I’m sure there are other similar programs I’m not aware of, so if you know of one, feel free to mention it in a comment below. What I do know is that I’ve barely started with this program, but on the third day of a 30-day free trial, I’m sold.
