JunkMatcher: free extra spam protection
JunkMatcher is a spam filter with an immediate advantage over SpamSieve and Personal Antispam. It’s free.
It offers two types of spam tests: (i) property tests using Bayesian filtering and blacklist lookup, and (ii) pattern tests to spot keywords such as “v1Ã¥gra” or “\/Iagr á”. Updated pattern tests can be downloaded from within the app’s interface.
JunkMatcher can work in place of Apple Mail’s inbuilt junk filter or with it for even smarter protection. A variety of analytical tools let you examine your spam in various ways, if you are that way inclined.
If Mail’s filter isn’t catching all your spam, this might be for you. It is open source and freeware, although donations are welcome. You can download it from Sourceforge.
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October 11th, 2005 at 9:12 pm
[...] I find that Apple Mail’s inbuilt filter and server-side filters do the job for me. Rarely do I see more than one spam email a week in my Inbox. But you may get more. If so, Spamfire or one of the other third-party spam catchers, JunkMatcher, SpamSieve or Personal Antispam, could be for you. [...]
December 17th, 2005 at 8:46 am
I’m using mail with several IMAP accounts. The server has a pretty good spam filter, so I have a smart mailbox that looks at all those mailboxes and I can quickly review to see if something legitimae is there (usually from a new site I’ve visited such as this one oar a purchase from a new site). I want to use Mail’s Junk filter and have those emails show up in my Smart Mailbox. But the Mail filters have no way to select mail marked Junk as far as I can see.
Any suggestions? I’m trying to sort out how to leverage IMAP amd Mail. I also have another email account that won’t allow me to use IMAP (1and1–says it does allow IMAP, but doesn’t work for me).
I think I want to leave Mail Junk in training mode and review in my Smart Junk folder.
PS: what addition to WordPress shows the Preview as you type?
December 17th, 2005 at 11:21 am
Hmmm…. I’m not sure if I understand the problem correctly. But if I do, here’s a few suggestions:
(i) Set the Junk filter to automatic. Then it will move the junk mail to one of the folders under you main (big) Spam mailbox icon. Then you can set a condition in the smartmailbox to include all messages in those folders.
(ii) Create a rule with Mail Act-on that will manually mark an email as junk and add a MailTags keyword, “Junk”. You can then set a condition in the smart mailbox to match messages with the MailTags keyword “Junk”.
The first is the simpler method though.
The plug-in is Live Comment Preview.
December 17th, 2005 at 2:44 pm
Thanks Tim
(i) seems to be working. I think I’m getting all the pieces to work together. Now to try on my laptop to make sure the IMAP part is working.
WordPress plug-ins are amazing.
December 17th, 2005 at 4:16 pm
Excellent news!
Yes, they are.
December 21st, 2005 at 10:22 am
[...] JunkMatcher or SpamSieve. It’s a draw for me which of these offers the better additional protection from spam. [...]
March 30th, 2006 at 1:13 am
I realize this post is a little old, but I am having some trouble with Mail crashing after installing JunkMatcher. I have Act-On, MailTags, and MailPictures installed as well, so I’m wondering if there are conflicts in there somewhere.
March 30th, 2006 at 1:31 am
Quit Mail.
Make a new folder in your ~/Library/Mail folder called “bundles_disabled” (or whatever).
Move the plugin bundles into that folder and then restart Mail. If the problems persist, it’s not the plugins’ fault.
If the problem is gone, add the bundles back into the bundles folder one by one until the problem reappears. The last one you have moved is your culprit.
I must say, though, that MailPictures and MailTags have never liked each other. I’m surprised that you haven’t had problems with the two of them before.
March 30th, 2006 at 2:08 am
It may be MailPictures. If so, I will get rid of it because I don’t really use it that much. I’m much more interested in efficiency than pretty. Thanks for your quick reply, Tim.
March 30th, 2006 at 7:29 am
No worries. I’d be interested to hear if that solves the problems.
November 26th, 2006 at 4:28 pm
I find Mail’s spam filters woefully inadequate – way more gets thru than gets nabbed – so I was glad to hear about this app. But the reviews at VersionTracker (http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/22023) have sure scared me off…
January 6th, 2007 at 12:27 am
There is also antoher alternative, direct all you rincoming mail to a googlemail account, then use maill.app to retrieve your mails. Googlemail (or possibly other online mail tools) have very powerfull anti spam filters.
Then use your regular maill.app to send emails with you regular account…
October 5th, 2009 at 5:18 am
Hi, I’m getting a bunch of spam in which the From: line looks like this:
Chanell Qlojzog
The “name” varies every time, but the From and Respond to email addresses are always mine.
The content of these emails is always HTML, always includes a spurious address, and always includes a link to “unsubscribe” or some variation.
Setting a Mail filter to Delete every mail that comes from my own email address does not work. Mail does not “see” the unsubscribe link, so that doesn’t work.
Any workarounds?
November 3rd, 2009 at 11:33 am
“The content of these emails is always HTML, always includes a spurious address, and always includes a link to “unsubscribe” or some variation.
Any workarounds?”
No, because Mail inexplicably doesn’t allow you to run filters against raw message source. With that simple capability, you could look for the consistent unsubscribe links, or Chinese or Russian domains, or any number obvious spam clues.
Then it compounds the defect by not running content filters AFTER stripping HTML tags; spammers break keywords up with bogus, meaningless HTML tags to fool the content filters. Again, this easy-to-fix problem has plagued customers for years.
December 16th, 2010 at 10:48 am
[...] JunkMatcher is a free, open-source plug-in for Apple Mail that doesn’t just implement a bayesian filter, but also checks for spam-like language and IP addresses to see if they’re common senders of SPAM. It integrates directly into Apple Mail and allows for a ton of customisation. [...]