SpamSieve 3.0
I’ve been away from blogging for a few days because I’ve been busy finishing up SpamSieve 3, getting it released, and responding to the onslaught of support e-mails. This is a major upgrade, which rewrites most of the app, both at the user interface level and internally. (Hello to Swift, Core Data, and a new e-mail parser and localization system; goodbye to nibs, custom file formats, and many lines of Objective-C. Some things like using lots of AppKit and AppleScript are constants.) This all enables more accurate spam filtering, makes the app easier to set up and use, and enables lots of new features—some available now and others planned for the future.
Perhaps I’ll write about some of that later. For now, the most important point is that SpamSieve 2 won’t work with Apple Mail on Sonoma—which is arriving on Tuesday—because Sonoma removes support for Mail plug-ins. And SpamSieve 3 will work on Sonoma because the Mail integration has been rewritten using a Mail extension (plus lots of AppleScript). Besides updating the SpamSieve app, there are some other changes you’ll want to understand. I’ve written a guide explaining the transition.
So far, the update has gone very well at an engineering level. I was nervous about changing so many parts of the app at once, but thanks to careful design, lots of internal unit testing and stress testing, and a great group of beta testers, no significant bugs have been reported yet. Of course, there are a bunch of small issues that will be cleaned up and polished in 3.0.1 and beyond, but I’m really happy with the state of the app. I think Kenichi Yoshida did great job with the new app icon and the status indicators within it.
I also want to thank all of the localizers. Version 3 is launching with support for German, Spanish, French, Japanese, and Dutch. Swedish is in the works. (Let me know if you would like to help add another language.) The localizers and international resellers (ASH and Infinisys) did a lot of work on short notice to get everything ready before Sonoma was released. There have been a few minor issues with the Paddle and FastSpring stores, but for the most part they’ve worked very well.
What has not gone so well is the mailing lists for contacting my own customers. Here I changed nothing from what’s worked very well in the past, yet it seems as though many—maybe even most—customers did not receive the e-mails announcing the new version or highlighting how to handle the update to Sonoma. Even I didn’t receive the latter. It took me a while to realize this because I was getting tons of e-mails, but they were almost all individually written, not replies to the list messages, like normal. I’m in communication with DreamHost to see if they can figure out what happened and how many e-mails were actually delivered, but at this point I think I need to find an alternate solution. I’m looking into setting up Sendy. Yes, it is ironic that I’m running into trouble sending—rather than stopping—mass e-mails. And also that I’m going to send some people duplicate e-mails because it’s important enough that everyone be apprised of the situation with Sonoma.
Previously:
