{“Reader Rosa Barron writes to ask:
“,”
Regrettably, Rosa, you’re not alone. I get several hundred spam messages a day and without adequate filtering, email would be useless to me. Because Mac OS X is my primary operating system I have lots of choices. My current favorite is Michael Tsai’s $25 “,”. Unfortunately, SpamSieve isn’t available for Mac OS 9.
Another good spam utility is, however. That utility is Matterform’s $40 “,”. Unlike SpamSieve, SpamFire works remotely rather than locally. By that I mean that it downloads your email to Matterform’s servers, filters it there, and forwards good mail to your email account via your ISP. Don’t worry, you’re allowed the opportunity to view the messages the program has filtered. If it mistakenly flags a good message as spam, you can recover the message and add the sender to your “good guys” list. And its filters are user configurable — if a particular kind of spam routinely sneaks through SpamFire’s filters, you can cobble together a homegrown filter to weed it out. “}