I was watching a friend working on her Mac. She was cursing as a ton of spam snuck right through the default junk filter that you get with Mail.app.
In the Apple software list that I published in the past, Spam Sieve was there with the comment “Waiting to see if needed”.
When I first started to use Mail.app, it was pretty good at coping with spam. It caught all but a few. However, a few months ago it couldn’t handle it anymore. A set of spam such as the darn stock images would get right through. This is when I jumped in to get Spam Sieve and it has taken care of the issue.
At this point I don’t know how you can cope with the normal filter as it just doesn’t work. I hope that Apple has put in some time on that for future Mail versions. Spam is such as PITA that you need to update your barriers regularly, so to do a good job you need the mail app provider, or plugin provider, to release constant updates that take into account the newest baddie.
What a shame.
October 9th, 2006 at 2:56 pm
Do yourself: forward all your mail to Gmail and see what happens. I’m betting you’ll see that Gmail caught most (if not all) your spam. Once you’re sold, just tweak the headers so people continue to see your personal email address and not Gmail, and you’re done.
Of course, you can also go with Google for Domains if you want to make things really cleanly.
October 10th, 2006 at 5:44 am
I’ve found that google’s fairly good at catching spam.. Even those f@#$@ picture ones for stocks.
There should be a “I’ll never buy anything from spam email” list that you can add your name to to save the spammers the effort.. Although unfortunately they’re not the most honourable of types.
My big gripe with spam is how butchered the web has become in terms of rel=nofollow crap everywhere in order to make google’s life easier.. Think the little “type in a number” stuff or a “mark as spam” button is a better solution. Google can just fix its algorithms if comment spam is getting good pagerank (or just ban searches for various *cough* enhancers, student l0ans etc etc)
October 10th, 2006 at 1:53 pm
I tried the Google spam thing and moved away from it, because:
1. I noticed a large number of false positives, and Google provides a crappy interface for finding these, and a surprising lack of ability to customize how it handles spam.
2. Twice in six months, the POP service stopped responding for me for an hour (the Web service was still up).
Lately, I just route email to my POP server and to Gmail, using Gmail only when behind extremely obnoxious firewalls (you know who you are).
My issue w/ Spam Sieve is that Mail’s Spotlight integration includes its spam folder by default, whereas when using Mail’s native junk mail processing, it skips the junk folder unless explicitly told to search it.
The benefit is that I now have a lot of flexibility for routing mail, pushing some through the spam filter, and letting others skip it, depending on a variety of factors, such as recipient, subject, etc.
Combined w/ Spam Sieve’s integration w/ Growl to show you summaries of suspect spam, and its immense tweakability, and I’m a much happier camper.
October 11th, 2006 at 3:21 am
I am using SPamSieve since the beginning of my Mac expierence. Its invaluable and simply necessary because Mail Spam filtering sucks. Its even better than my kaspersky server based spam filter.