Tikkabik

A few days ago I told you about my spam problems -- over 100 an hour in some cases, really atrocious. At my boss' behest, I installed an OS X app called SpamSieve that does wonders. I'm still not totally spam free, but I'm looking at a spam folder in my Entourage directory that has almost 2000 messages in it, and they're virtually all spam.

I woke up this morning to find about 70 messages in my inbox, versus the usual 600 or 700 that come in overnight. Of those, maybe 50 were spam or bouncebacks from virus detection software apps (people with worms who have our addresses in their address book continue to be a big problem, also).

So before, my own brute-force method of filtering spam by using complex rules in Entourage was netting probably about 20-30 percent automatically. Judging from my experience with SpamSieve, it's closer to 90 percent effective, and since it's still "learning" as I mark spam and tell it to move the spam, it's bound to improve over time.

SpamSieve integrates with Entourage via AppleScript, which isn't the fastest method in the world but it works really effectively. SpamSieve employs Bayesian filtering, which I don't pretend to understand intimately, but my experience with similar technology integrated into Apple's own Mail.app software tells me it works better than other methods I've tried.

Well worth the US$20 registration fee, imo.