While you’re waiting for President Bush to sign the CAN-SPAM law into effect, you can help counter spam with SpamSieve 2.1, the latest update to shareware developer Michael Tsai. SpamSieve provides Bayesian spam filtering for popular email clients such as Apple Mail, Emailer, Entourage, Eudora 5.2 or later, Mailsmith , and PowerMail. New in version 2.1 is support for Apple Mail POP accounts enabling POP messages to be marked as junk and colored.
A training tip window provides advice on how to improve the program’s accuracy based on the current database of spam messages. Rules in the whitelist and blocklist now are no longer limited to matching the sender address, they can now be matched in any header field, as well as the message body.
SpamSieve can also read the Entourage address book, and use it as a whitelist meaning that Entourage can now accurately inform users when non-spam mail is received.
Several changes were made to improve spam filtering as well.
Bayesian filtering, such as that used in SpamSieve is seen as a highly effective counter-spam tool thanks to the way with which it can adapt to user patterns, creating customized spam filtering.
SpamSieve costs $25, with version 2.1 a free update for registered users. It requires Mac OS 10.2.6 or later. A demo can be downloaded from the developer’s Web site.