Archive for June 18, 2003

Wednesday, June 18, 2003

SpamSieve 1.3.1 and Mailsmith 2.0

SpamSieve IconSpamSieve 1.3.1 and Mailsmith 2.0 are out. The SpamSieve update is minor. It's about making SpamSieve 1.3 a little faster, better, and smaller to tide people over to the next major release. Mailsmith 2.0 is a major update. Besides adding support for the Mac OS X Address Book, PGP, background queries, clickable links, digest bursting, better mailbox pop-ups, and a refined interface, it features direct integration with SpamSieve. No more AppleScripts or filters: enabling SpamSieve in Mailsmith is as easy as clicking a checkbox.

Mailsmith Spam Handing

Bare Bones Software has seamlessly integrated SpamSieve with Mailsmith's powerful filtering system. You can choose what happens when you manually mark messages as spam or good. For instance, I have it set so that correcting a false positive re-applies Mailsmith's filters to the message, thus filing it in the proper folder. Mailsmith can automatically move spam messages to its (spam) folder, but if you want more control there are also new filter criteria called Is Spam and Is Not Spam. It sweats the details: Mailsmith knows not to bounce or animate its Dock icon after receiving a batch of messages that are all spam. You can also add an address to SpamSieve's whitelist by Control-clicking on the message's sender and choosing Add to Address Book from the contextual menu. For extra speed, Mailsmith sends SpamSieve decoded versions of the messages (there's no sense in both programs decoding them) and strips out large non-text attachments that can be slow to transfer through the Apple event pipe.

New purchases of Mailsmith between now and July 30 will include a free copy of SpamSieve, and there is an additional 10% discount if you order before June 30. SpamSieve continues to work with e-mail clients other than Mailsmith, and 1.3.1 adds some improvements specifically for users of Emailer, Entourage, Eudora, and PowerMail. Of course, if the developers of these or other clients wish to also provide direct integration with SpamSieve, the interface that Mailsmith and SpamSieve use to communicate is completely open. I would be happy to answer any questions that they have about it.