Spam Filters for Your Mac: Six Choices

April 3, 2007
By

Joe Kissell

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Price: $30

Works with: Apple Mail, Entourage, Eudora, GyazMail, Mailsmith, PowerMail, Thunderbird.

Pros: Bayesian filter with adjustable sensitivity; blacklist; whitelist; regular expressions; excellent integration with email clients; nearly invisible operation.

Cons: Limited actions available for suspected spam; some initial manual training required.

It’s hard to find anything bad to say about SpamSieve, the gold standard of Mac anti-spam programs. It’s highly accurate, unobtrusive, configurable, and frequently updated.

Of course, there’s still room for improvement. I keep wishing I could get SpamSieve to give me more granular control over how it treats suspected spam. For example, I’d like truly obvious spam to be trashed immediately, and I’d like spam from different accounts to be routed to different junk mailboxes. I wish the initial step of training it with spam and “ham” were more automated. And I’d prefer that, like Personal Antispam X4, it were completely invisible when running in the background. But these are nits; it’s far and away my favorite spam filter.

SIX CHOICES: