CNET Editors' review
SpamSieve is a powerful, popular spam-filtering app that can help you greatly reduce unwanted e-mails in Mail, Entourage, MailForge, Outlook 2011, and other e-mail clients. Because SpamSieve uses Bayesian filtering (a process that looks at the statistical probability of every word in an e-mail) and you train it using your own e-mail, the app actually becomes more effective over time. It learns not just how to better identify ever-changing spam but also how to zero in on the peculiarities of your own legitimate e-mail (whether that's using the names of your family members or your friends' frequent and obscure references to the "Halo" backstory).
SpamSieve integrates directly with your e-mail client, which is especially helpful if you use multiple clients or need to move from one client to another. You train SpamSieve using easy "Train as Good" and "Train as Spam" commands (from the menu bar, or with a keyboard shortcut, much like Mail's "Mark as Junk"), although when you initially set up the app, you'll need to make several changes manually in your client's preferences. Fortunately, SpamSieve has a clear and extensive manual, which even includes instruction on how you can use SpamSieve to help filter spam on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch. For SpamSieve to be effective at first, you also have to spend a few minutes training it by hand with 100 or more messages. Combined with SpamSieve's price tag, this might be too much involvement for casual users, but for anyone who deals with a lot of spam despite their client and ISP's built-in filtering, it can be time and money well-spent.
Publisher's Description
From C-Command Software:
SpamSieve gives you back your inbox by bringing powerful Bayesian spam filtering to popular e-mail clients. It learns what your spam looks like, so it can block nearly all of it. It looks at your address book and learns what your good messages look like, so it won't confuse them with spam. Other spam filters get worse over time as spammers adapt to their rules; SpamSieve actually gets better over time as you train it with more messages. SpamSieve doesn't delete any messages--it only marks them in your e-mail client--so you'll never lose any mail. SpamSieve works with any number of mail accounts, of whatever types are supported by your e-mail software (e.g. POP, IMAP, Hotmail, AOL).
- Powerful Bayesian spam filtering results in high accuracy and almost no false positives. It adapts to the mail that you receive to get even better with time. Some other e-mail clients include Bayesian filters, but SpamSieve is more accurate.
- Integrates with your e-mail client for a superior user experience. Plus, you get the same great filtering if you ever switch e-mail clients or use more than one at a time.
- Integrates with the Mac OS X Address Book (and also Eudora's and Entourage's address books) so that messages from friends and colleagues are never marked as spam.
- Automatically maintains a blocklist so that it can instantly adapt to spam messages sent from particular addresses, and catch 100% of them.
- Automatically maintains a whitelist to guarantee that messages from particular senders or mailing lists are never marked as spam, without cluttering your address book with these addresses.
- You can customize the whitelist and blocklist, adding sophisticated rules that match various message headers, or the message body. The rules can match text in a variety of ways, including using regular expressions.
- Can use the Habeas Safelist, which indicates messages that are not spam, as well as the "ADV" subject tag indicating that a message is spam.
- Many spammers encode the contents of their messages so that filters cannot see the incriminating words they contain. SpamSieve can decode and look inside these messages. Optionally it can mark them all as spam, on the theory that legitimate senders do not try to obscure their messages.
- SpamSieve keeps track of how accurate it is, how many good and spam messages you receive, and how these numbers change over time.
- Turn off new-mail notification in your e-mail client, and let SpamSieve notify you only when you receive non-spam messages.
- The corpus window and log let you see how each spam message was caught.
What's new in this version:
- Improved compatibility with pre-release versions of Mac OS X.
- Added support for Postbox 3.0.
- Added support for Growl 1.3.
- Made various changes to improve SpamSieve's filtering accuracy.
- The Exclude my addresses feature now lets you specify additional addresses via Terminal, if you don't want to clutter your "Me" card in Address Book.
- The Apple Mail plug-in installer is more resilient to permissions errors.
- Added example of using color... See all new features
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All versions:
4.6 starsout of 142 votes
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Current version:
1.0 starsout of 1 votes
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My rating:
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"Not worth the effort and painful to uninstall"
Version: SpamSieve 2.8.8
Pros
There are none.
Cons
No gain over Apple's standard junk mail feature and extremely difficult to uninstall.
Summary
Apples junk mail filter is just as good, there's nothing to gain from using Spamsieve. Much worse it's very difficult to delete this program after you've installed it. Right now after deleting everything as suggested by Spamsieve I've got a Spam folder that keeps coming back on Apple's mail client and every single email is going there. I'm going to waste hours of my time trying to fix this piece of junk's installation. Don't buy but even more importantly don't even try.
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