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Mac 101: Beef up your spam filters in Mail (video)
Nobody likes spam, but if you use Apple's Mail on Mountain Lion, at least you have some tools to deal with it. Plenty of Mac users rely on Mail to read, manage and process their emails... and spam messages. If you use email, you have spam -- that's just the way it works. Following up on Kelly's how-to from a few months back, let's take a look at some ways to manage spam efficiently and decrease your email processing time. Built-in Spam Filtering Mail's built-in spam filtering is enabled by default. You'll find it in the Junk Mail setting in Preferences. Make sure that the box labeled "Enable junk mail filtering" is selected. You can also determine where spam messages go after detection, or add exemptions to your filter. [Note that some online mail services -- Gmail in particular -- recommend disabling Mail's onboard spam filtering. Be sure to check the setup instructions for your service provider. --Ed.] In the Viewing preferences tab, disable "Display remote images in HTML messages." Some spammers send out messages with web bugs -- invisible images linked to the specific message you received -- that notify the spammer that your email is an active email account once you click on the message. From the spammer's perspective, this "validates" you as a real, live address, which then generates more spam for you. Not good. Turning off this feature prevents the spammer from recognizing your email as an active email account. Creating Rules Mail lets you create rules to fine-tune your spam filtering. One helpful method is to create a new mailbox for messages that meet your spam criteria. Once your new mailbox is created and properly labeled (i.e., "Spam-ish"), go to the Rules setting under Preferences and create specific actions based on a predetermined set of criteria. For example: If all the Content-Type Contains 'multipart/related' then Move Message to [the mailbox you just created]. Now that you've set that rule, messages that meet your criteria are moved to that mailbox. Fine-Tuning No spam filter is completely foolproof, so you will get false positives and false negatives. Mail allows you to select a message and click on "Not Junk" or "Load Image" which will correct the labeling of the message. The more times you correct these errors, the better Mail gets at reducing them. A good rule of thumb is to review your Junk Mail folder periodically to make sure valid messages haven't slipped through the cracks. Cloud Mail If you're not using Mail on your Mac, you still have options in the cloud. An iCloud or Gmail account can act as a buffer between malicious spam and your computer. In some cases, the cloud service filters may be a bit too aggressive; if you suspect some of your inbound mail is being blocked incorrectly, be sure to check the support page for your provider and test with another account. Third-Party Spam Utilities Several third-party spam utilities are available to further enhance your spam-squashing powers, including SpamSieve from C-Command Software. It's been around for quite a while and works very well. A single license will cost you US$30; a free trial is also available. SaneBox is an online application which helps to sort your email into proper boxes and reduces your email processing time. An added feature is that it runs through spam amazingly well. The Smart filtering feature of SaneBox reads your email messages, determines the level of importance and moves unimportant messages out of the inbox. The @SaneBlackHole will not only delete your spam messages but makes sure you never receive email from the sender again and automatically unsubscribes you from the mailing list. You can also defer processing your email by placing your email in the "@SaneTomorrow" or "@SaneNextWeek" folder and it will automatically pop back into your inbox when the time comes. The cost for SaneBox is US$5/month but if you refer other people you'll receive extra credits. The free Mailstrom.co service also can help you reduce spam along with unwanted subscriptions, newsletters and so forth. Mailstrom groups your email by big-picture criteria (sender, subject, size, etc.) and lets you archive or delete in bulk with a single click. For catalog emails or newsletters, you can also unsubscribe in only a few steps, rather than having to track down and confirm individual unsubscribe requests. By using these techniques, hopefully the only place you will see spam is in your musubi.
Friday Favorite: SpamSieve 2.76
My Friday favorite is SpamSieve. We have mentioned it a few times previously, but since it has recently been updated to version 2.76 I wanted to sing its praises again. It's the best way I've found to deal with spam. Using Bayesian filtering, SpamSieve installs as a plug-in to your mail client and lets you mark messages as spam. As you do, it builds a a corpus file of rules telling determining what is spam and what isn't. The more messages you mark, or train, the more accurate SpamSieve gets. I've been using it since November of 2003 and after years of training, it's so accurate that it rarely fails to catch an errant spam encrusted message. When it does, using either a keystroke sequence or a pulldown menu from your Mail client you can train it as spam. At the start, it's quite labor intensive since you have to mark a few hundred messages for it to really start working, but it pays dividends. After a while, you'll have a personalized set of inclusion/exclusion rules that gets better over time. To give you an idea, yesterday I received 307 emails. Out of those SpamSieve correctly marked and moved over 30 messages and missed only 2 that needed training. This is a shot of my corpus screen showing how many messages have been filtered and how many words were read resulting in messages being regarded as spam or good. Yes, over 15,000 messages is a big number, but by being cumulative, SpamSieve gets more and more accurate over time. SpamSieve allows you to import or export the corpus file so if you get a new computer, or decide to use a different email client, you lose nothing.
SpamSieve 2.7 is available
The great SpamSieve was updated earlier this week to version 2.7. If you're unfamiliar with SpamSieve, you're probably inundated with unwanted email. It's a piece of software that works with your email client and excels at squashing spam long before you ever see it. Over time, it gets better at identifying what you consider spam as well as those benign messages you want to see. Version 2.7 offers many great improvements, including: Several variety of accuracy improvements, focused on dealing Improved corpus speed and memory use Various improvements to the column widths and alignments in the rules and corpus windows, and added alternating row colors There's more, of course, and you can read the rest here. While you're at it, read this tutorial for setting up a drone SpamSieve Mac. I've been running one for months and it works wonderfully.SpamSieve 2.7 is a free update for registered users and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later.
.Mac's slow death
Somebody call the ambulance, because .Mac is dying...and Google is the assassin (with a little help from his sidekick Firefox). Now I've been using .Mac since it was free and called "iTools." I was initially lured in by the convenience of iDisk, the mac.com email address and so on. Web bookmark and contact syncing are also super-convenient, and as time passed I made use of some of the other .Mac services, like iCal publishing and so on. Everything was fine. Not free anymore, but fine. Then Google introduced (free) Gmail with oodles more storage than .Mac offers, calendars and so on. To make a long story short, I'm about to give .Mac the boot for good. After the jump, a breakdown of why.
SpamSieve goes universal
Today, SpamSieve has been updated to version 2.4.1. For the uninitiated, SpamSieve is a customizable spam filtering application for Mac email clients, including Mail, Mailsmith, Entourage, PowerMail, and Eudora. As the title suggests, this version is a universal binary. Other changes in version 2.4.1 included: Various changes have been made to the application's HTML parser to improve accuracy. Filtering of messages containing attachments has been improved Added Apple Mail settings to control whether messages trained as spam are marked as read and/or left on the server. Better at finding notification sounds that are built into mail clients. You can purchase a single license of SpamSieve for $25US, and it requires Mac OS X 10.2.8 or later (10.3.5 or later recommended).
