Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Apps of the Year and SpamSieve Scores

I’m honored that John Gruber’s list of Apps of the Year, 2004 includes SpamSieve. Gruber does a good job of explaining the utility of SpamSieve’s scores feature, which makes it easier and quicker for you to scan your spam for false positives by telling you how spammy it thinks each message is. Most people, I suspect, don’t use scores because they don’t get that much mail, but if you do get a lot, they’re quite helpful.

SpamSieve’s scores have a different meaning than scores from other anti-spam software. In the traditional approach, each message is assigned a score (say, from 0 to 100). The user can then set a threshold saying, for instance, that messages with scores 90 or higher are spam; those with scores less than 90 are good. Adjusting the threshold lets you adjust the aggressiveness of the filter, and by looking for messages with scores near the threshold, you can tell which ones the filter was uncertain about.

For a variety of practical and philosophical reasons, SpamSieve works differently. If it thinks that a message is good, it assigns it a score from 0 to 49; if it thinks it’s spam, it assigns it a score from 50 to 100. Thus, looking at a score, you can tell (a) whether the message was classified as spam, and (b) how sure SpamSieve was, without needing to know the current threshold. It’s always 50. You have two controls:

E-mail clients show scores in different ways. Eudora and PowerMail show the score in its own column in the message list. In Mailsmith, you can use a script to label messages according to their scores; you can set the uncertain threshold in the script. In Apple Mail, SpamSieve uses colors to show the score. In Entourage, very spammy messages are assigned the “Junk” category, and less spammy messages are assigned the “Uncertain Junk” category; you can set the threshold in the Notification tab of the preferences.

Personally, I use Mailsmith. I could use the above-mentioned script to label spam messages by their scores, but I prefer another approach: I have SpamSieve notify me with Growl when a borderline message arrives. Every suspected spam message goes into my (spam) mailbox. If a message with a score less than 75 arrives, Growl shows a notification window that tells me the message’s subject, its score, its sender, and the first few lines of its body. This way, I get instant notification that a possibly good message has arrived (just as I get a notification in the Dock when genuine good mail arrives). If, as is usually the case, SpamSieve was right and the message is spam, I can dismiss the notification with a single click. This way, I only have to bring Mailsmith to the front if there’s real mail to read.

6 Comments RSS · Twitter

Is there any way of using this feature with GyazMail? Currently, I have GyazMail set to filter junk mail into a spam folder, but (if I can ever be bothered), I have to scan the folder myself for false positives.

You can use the Growl feature with GyazMail, but I don't think there's presently a way to show the scores within GyazMail itself.

Okay, that's fair enough, really. SpamSieve has (for me) such a low rate of false positives, that I've become generally quite happy to trash everything in the span folder without even really looking!

To put uncertain spam messages in a different folder in PowerMail, you can use this script.

Roger Bourland

My Entourage works well at identifying spam and it does it with good consistency. I would like to be able to automatically delete the spam without even knowing it is there, even at the risk of losing valid mail on occasion. Would SpamSieve do that for me?

Yes, you can use the "SpamSieve - Change Settings" command in Entourage's Scripts menu to tell SpamSieve to put incoming spam messages in the trash.

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