llib.org

I used to use Spamfire religiously to thwart the spam volumes in my increasingly clogged inbox. About six months ago I noticed the application had been getting increasingly unstable, timing out sometimes or just seemingly taking too long in filtering down my mail (I know I’m impatient). Anyways my subscription lapsed and for about six months I relied on the Apple Mail junk mail filter. This actually worked fairly well until about three weeks ago when a new type of spam seemed to be breaking through with record speed. I decided to renew my SpamFire subscription and try it again. I downloaded the newest version and updated my filters….at first all seemed good, but this latest version also seems to be strangely slow and a bit unstable, particularly as I gain and lose internet connections while I move from home to office or wireless to LAN. It also just seemed to take too long. As I complained about this in the office Derek suggested I give SpamSieve a try. It took a bit for me to get my head around bayesian filtering (despite Ryan praising it for awhile now), but now that I’ve got it going I think I’m liking this way of spam fighting a lot more. It ’seems’ faster, and I think that this is probably just a component of how they integrate with Mail but overall it seems to be very stable and doing a fairly effective job of catching spam. It also is way easier to rescue messages that it tags incorrectly (as opposed to spamfire’s method of resending the email back to your account - which is a real pain if it’s part of a group mail list). I’ve got twenty eight days left in the trial, will report on the stats (for my own record) at the end of the trial.