Review: SpamSieve - Junk Email Filtering

SpamSieve
Review by: Katie
http://c-command.com/spamsieve/
Price: $25

I receive an astronomical amount of junk mail and spend quite a bit of time each week filtering through what's good and what's junk email.

Until recently, I refused to pay money for a spam filtering program. I was using Microsoft Entourage (I now use Mail) and both programs have a decent Spam filter, but it wasn't great and iI had to regularly check through the Spam folder to make sure good messages weren't miscategorized as spam and of course I would regularly still have a few junk mail messages show up in my inbox which is always frustrating. Then I got creative, I created my own email rules which essentially became a secondary email filter. (For example, "If Message Body contains the word Viagra then move message to folder Spam and Mark as Read.") This worked for a while, but the problem is Spammers are getting smarter in the way they create their email messages which make the messages appear more-likely to be good messages, and therefore bypass spam filters. Now I'm getting really frustrated....

In comes SpamSieve. At first I didn't like the idea at all of paying for a Spam filter. I shouldn't NEED a spam filter but, then again, you shouldn't need firewalls, antivirus, antispyware and all that other stuff. But the reality is Spam is here to stay and unless I wanted to keep messing with it I had to do something. SpamSieve comes with a fully functional 30 day trial, so there's no risk. Use it for 30 days, I guarantee if you get a reasonable amount of spam that's rising to the level of frustrating, you'll happily pay the very reasonable $25 fee.

SpamSieve works off a method known as Bayesian filtering. Basically the program looks at every word in your email messages and gives each word a numerical rating and using a statistical filtering method that's way over my head, it's able to determine the probability of the message being spam. You can tweak the level but any email over a certain probability will be categorized as Spam and moved to a separate folder-it will not be deleted. This is very important because just incase of the very rare case that SpamSieve categorizes a message incorrectly. I've found SpamSieve has a 99.6% correct rate, and those very few mistakes were made very early in the process and I have since trained the program further.

Now, SpamSieve is not as simple as download, install and all of your Spam problems will be solved. The beauty of SpamSieve is that you train it so that it learns what messages YOU consider Spam depending on the types of emails you have coming into your inbox. In order to train SpamSieve it's recommended that you have at least 100 emails in your email program. These should be "typical" emails you receive so don't delete your junk mail as you'll need that to train SpamSieve initially. Of course the more messages you can train SpamSieve with the more accurate it will be. If you don't have a group of typical emails you can always train SpamSieve as you go, though expect it to take a week or so before you're getting near-perfect results. Of course, full documentation on how to train SpamSieve is included with the download.

Overall, SpamSieve has made managing my email a lot simpler. It's been very accurate and although it's a program I wish I didn't need, i find it now to be one I can't live without! If Apple ever truly opens up the iPhone to developers I hope that SpamSieve is one of the first products ported over.