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Defeat Unwanted Spam with SpamSieve

About a month or so ago, the amount of spam that I receive on a day to day basis seemed to have dramatically increased. As an effort to fight off these unwanted messages, I started searching for an advanced spam filtering plugin for Apple Mail. After 2 weeks of trying out SpamSieve, I'm about to make this configuration permanent. Here are the stats for my first couple weeks. Keep in mind, this includes training the software so as time goes on the filtering gets better and better.

Filtered Mail
299 Good Messages
2369 Spam Messages (89%)
135 Spam Messages Per Day

SpamSieve Accuracy
47 False Positives
21 False Negatives (31%)
97.5% Correct

Corpus
299 Good Messages
552 Spam Messages (65%)
46670 Total Words

Rules
44 Blocklist Rules
201 Whitelist Rules

Showing Statistics Since
3/14/05 9:25 AM

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Posted by Mike Shoemaker on March 31, 2005 9:11:55 PM CST #


Re: Defeat Unwanted Spam with SpamSieve

Comment from Brad on April 1, 2005 4:33:21 PM CST #
Great Information. When you confirm it works on Tiger, please post an update. I'm going to swallow the pill (again) and try Apple Mail once more when Tiger 10.4.1 comes out.

Re: Defeat Unwanted Spam with SpamSieve

Comment from Mike Shoemaker on April 1, 2005 5:07:52 PM CST #
I'm running Tiger and although Mail has been updated, Spam filtering has not gotten much better. The current version works with Tiger already. Give it a try, it's free for 30 days.

Re: Defeat Unwanted Spam with SpamSieve

Comment from Paul Brown on April 4, 2005 9:16:55 PM CDT #
You may also have good luck with a local mail redelivery loop. My current configuration (which handles ~500 SPAM per day with no false positives and 10-15 false negatives) uses fetchmail to feed bogofilter via procmail and then a local POP3 server. The same technique can be used with SpamAssassin or others filters alone or in combination. How you integrate that with Mail.app is up to you (e.g., AppleScript in 10.3, Automator(?) in 10.4). Granted, this is a lot more work than SpamSieve or the Mail.app filter, but it does provide a good amount of control and flexibility.

Re: Defeat Unwanted Spam with SpamSieve

Comment from Mike Shoemaker on April 5, 2005 9:33:59 AM CDT #
Paul, your solution sounds a bit more sound than mine. Currently, my email client has to deal with the SPAM meaning I have to download and process it all. A much more proactive approach would be to put the fitering at the server so my client would not have to deal with any of it. I'm running a 2yr old version of JAMES so I'm not sure what I can hook in to it. I'm sure the newer versions are better, just need to find time to upgrade. Thanks for your comments.