Once upon a time I thought it would be a great idea to include my email address at the top of each IPB source code file.
Fast forward three years and three million spam emails and I’m glad I removed it a few years ago. Despite having my IPS emails filtered via the corporate spam filter and using gmail for just about everything else I still have an annoying amount of spam to deal with.
Apple Mail’s built in junk filter does an OK job but I found that it was
junking more and more legitimate email while letting Nigerian scam
emails through just fine.
Thanks to a blog entry by Tim Dorr, I downloaded and installed SpamSieve.
SpamSieve gives you back your inbox by bringing powerful Bayesian spam filtering to Mac e-mail clients. It’s quick and easy to control SpamSieve from within your mail client, and you can customize how it interacts with the rest of your message sorting rules. Other spam filters get worse over time as spammers adapt to their rules; SpamSieve actually gets better over time as it adapts to your mail. By learning from the very messages that you receive, SpamSieve is able to block nearly all of your spam, without putting your good messages in the spam mailbox.
It’s an audacious claim – and one that is backed up by the spam sieve statistics. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and apart from the odd rogue email, it’s done a remarkable job. It works as a plug-in for Apple’s Mail (and can also work as a plug in for Thunderbird and Entourage) and takes over junk mail duty. You can train it with known “good” and “bad” messages and it keeps a log of what it’s up to. You can also add your own entries to its “whitelist” and “blocklist”.
Here’s some statistics collected since the 14th of this month:
Filtered Mail
307 Good Messages
3222 Spam Messages (91%)
201 Spam Messages Per DaySpamSieve Accuracy
3 False Positives
13 False Negatives (81%)
99.5% Correct
It’s not a free product, but the $25 price tag is more than justified. If you’re using Apple Mail – give SpamSieve a go.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
See? I told you (indirectly)!
Looks like you’ve got more spam getting through those filters higher up in the chain. These are my stats since the 14th:
Filtered Mail
16869 Good Messages
2641 Spam Messages (14%)
160 Spam Messages Per Day
SpamSieve Accuracy
11 False Positives
1 False Negatives (8%)
99.9% Correct
Yes, I get a lot of email
I used to get a whole lot of junk until I abandoned a few email addresses.
Matt,
Could you share with me how come your are using MT instead of your own “Invision Blog” ?
Thanks
Regards
forrestRain
forrestRain: Invision Blog is a plugin for IPB, so Matt would need a forum installed to be able to use it.
I should look into this. For some reason, Thunderbird has recently started marking *all* of my e-mail as junk, and – although it isn’t moving any of it to the junk mail folder – it won’t stop, even though I’ve reset the training data several times, and tried various other things to stop it. >:-(
If sysops would spend less than 20 minutes extra when installing mailservers, you wouldn’t need to have a spamfilter on the clientside. On my mailserver I installed Exim with SpamAssassin and configured my custom scores. Of the ~40000 mails I received in my inbox in the last 8 months, <10 spams got through the filter while my emailaddresses can be found all over usenet, forums, high traffic public mailinglists, domainname whois’ and creepy newsletters (to speedup SA’s auto learning). For safety all spam is delivered to a spam box to prevent loosing the good stuff, but in the last 8 months it only contained real spam.
Not only does it save bandwidth it also saves money because SA and Exim are both free