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Busting Spam with SpamSieve 2.0
By Steve Manke If you ask 100 Internet savvy computer users what they hate most about going online, at least 80 will complain about spam. The volume of junk email has exploded in recent years and now the problem seems to get worse by the day. While Federal and State officials debate the best way to handle this issue, our inboxes fill with hundreds of unrequested advertisements... or worse. This junk mail, or spam, has a tremendous cost associated with it. Consider the bandwidth used worldwide for hundreds of millions of these useless emails to make it to their destination. Consider the massive mail servers required to deal with the sheer volume of messages. Next consider how much time it takes to deal with hundreds of unsolicited messages for each valid email you receive. Simply sorting the pertinent email from the unsolicited can cost companies millions of dollars in man-hours each year. In an effort to resolve issues like these, many companies are working on products that can be installed directly on mail servers. They do their best to filter the email prior to clients downloading it. Unfortunately, what is junk mail to one user might have been requested information by another. It is nearly impossible for a computer to look at each message and decide what is spam and what is not. They can make educated guesses, but they will never be right 100% of the time. Many email clients now have some sort of built in spam filter. OS X’s Mail is famous for having one of the best filters around. Microsoft's Entourage spam filtering pales in comparison, but is still considered by many to be a close second. This week, c-command.com released its spam filtering utility, SpamSieve 2.0. It is a real-time spam filter that works in tandem with your existing email client. As the web site indicates, SpamSieve works with Emailer, Entourage, Eudora, Mailsmith, and Powermail. It uses multiple approaches to decide what mail is spam. And if you are not using OS X's Mail, this may be the next best thing (maybe even better). SpamSieve uses Bayesian filtering in addition to black and while lists to better classify spam. In addition to this, SpamSieve is actually able to learn what is spam based on your emailing habits. As you continue to use it, it learns about your email habits. The longer you spend training it, the more effective it becomes. I tested SpamSieve 2.0 using Microsoft Entourage. After downloading the software, I copied 4 AppleScripts to the designated location on my hard drive. When I launched Entourage, those scripts appeared in my scripts menu. I then set up two mail filters per the instructions. When I next checked my email, a new folder was created in Entourage and everything that SpamSieve recognized as spam was filed in that folder. From there, it was time for me to start training SpamSieve. Any spam that stayed in my inbox was easy to correct. I just selected each of the messages that I considered spam and chose the “Mark as Spam” option from Entourage’s script menu. All of the messages are automatically moved to the spam folder. Even more useful, SpamSieve analyzes those messages so that it can better identify spam in the future. Inversely, when I went into the spam folder, I simply had to select any messages that should not have been considered spam, and choose the “Mark as Good” option from the script menu. With this, SpamSieve knows how to better recognize good mail in the future. In addition to appearing in the script menu, each of the scripts also has a keyboard shortcut associated with it. This makes training the product a breeze! It took me one day to get SpamSieve working to my satisfaction. My mail server already uses a product called SpamAssassin to flag the majority of the spam downloading to my computer. This is effective, but there are always a couple of dozen messages that are in fact spam but are not marked as such. SpamSieve made short work of these messages and left my inbox virtually free from clutter. If your ISP does not support spam filtering at the server level, SpamSieve save you even more time. Since SpamSieve only files away spam and does not instantly delete it, it leaves us with a location that we can check to make sure no vital emails were misidentified. If they are, you can teach SpamSieve how to handle them next time. When you are done with the folder, just delete its contents and you are set for your next mail download. Given the time it normally takes to deal with spam, SpamSieve is a fast, efficient, and easy way to help deal with the problem. It gets high marks where most competing products fail to live up to expectations. Since the product works in tandem with your existing email client, setting up SpamSieve differs from person to person. Given that the product is shareware, you can download it for free and give it a try. If you find it effective, it will cost you $25 to register. If SpamSieve saves you as much time as it has me, it will be well worth the money! |