An updated version of SpamSieve released today offers several nice improvements:

• Most importantly, perhaps, Michael Tsai the developer continues to improve SpamSieve’s accuracy by counteracting various spammer tricks.
• The delay, when using Apple Mail on Tiger, between choosing “Train as Good” or “Train as Spam” and when training actually started is gone.
• Growl notifications from people in the address book now include the “To” address for mailing list messages, which makes it easier to decide whether to ignore the notification.
• It also features Improved the error messages, improved display of the demo time remaining and updated localisations

SpamSieve is available from the developer’s web site and is shareware (USD 25).spamsieve, spam, phishing, mail.app, apple mail, plugins

Veronica, a Listable user, has put together a comprehensive list of 30 services that provide disposable email adddresses.

I don’t feel the need for something like this myself, but many people find disposable addresses a useful way to combat spam or to provide a means of contact for people or companies on those occasions when using your permanent email address seems like a bad idea.

You will find well-known services like Spamgourmet and PookMail on the list.

Less well-known are services like Sofort Mail , a German provider that offers anonymous emails addresses without the need for registration.

If you are into this sort of thing, this is a list to bookmark.email, spam, email address, anonymity, disposable, fighting spam

Following some links on del.icio.us today, I stumbled across Dan’s Mail Format Site , a site full of backgrounding on email and how it works.

It covers everything from emoticons and RFC 2822 to MIME encoding, lots of stuff on headers and the politics of quoting, including one of my favourite topics, the great top vs bottom posting debate.

It may not be as up-to-date as it could be, but it is still a great resource and a feast of browsing for people who want to learn a bit more about how email works.email, tips, history, emoticons, quoting

The MacBlogosphere is getting heavy with nostalgia as the occasion of Apple’s 30th birthday approaches on 1 April.

Wired.com seems to have the best content for the occasion, including a series of Apple Heroes and Villains , Steve Job’s best quotes ever , Wired’s best articles on Apple and a set of screenshots on the evolution of the GUI.

Guy Kawasaki’s video interview on Steve Jobs and Apple’s future at C|Net is interesting too.

When confronted by all this gushing talk of excellence and innovation, I turn my mind back to Apple Mail’s early years as NeXTMail.

Perhaps recent switchers like me, who haven’t travelled with Apple through the Valley of Death and back, don’t deserve to have an opinion. Even so, it seems to me that while Mail.app has come a long way, it has lost some good things too.

Just like Apple iteslf. Just like a real 30 year old.apple, 30th birthday, nostalgia, wired, guy kawasaki, NeXTMail, mail.app, apple mail

A while ago I posted about a number of people who have enjoyed the switch from Mail.app to the new Spotlight-enabled and Sync-capable Entourage.

Sven Semmler was delighted with the switch a week ago. He still is; Redmond is still making his day.

In his most recent post he describes how he can still do everything in Entourage that he once did with Mail. He also records some fixes for the problems of double Spotlight results and handling iCal invitations and reminders which users of the new Entourage experience. They would be worth recording, if this site was interested in Entourage.

James Caudill also finds Entourage far superior to Mail.app. He outlines a number of problems that made Mail unusable for him and make Entourage his email client of choice:

Don’t get me wrong. If someone said, “Hey they fixed a lot of stuff in Mail.App and it is stable now.” I will be the first one to try using it again. I love the simple layout and the pretty icons and stuff, but I really need dependability first.

Del.icio.us user mjg is heading back to Entourage too. He says, “Apple Mail just isn’t cutting it, especially with its lack of support for secondary-CA signed certificates.”entourage, mail.app, apple mail, spotlight, syncing, certificates, email, switching

A recent tip and the comments on it on macOSXHints provide a handy summary of the options for finding and removing duplicate entries in your Address Book.

There are at least three options:

A. Address Book’s built-in ‘Look for Duplicate Entries’ Option

Select the ‘Look for Duplicate Entries…” option from the Card menu. This is less than helpful because it doesn’t give you any information about the cards it will merge. It only offers to do it, without telling you what it’s doing:

B. List duplicates with a Terminal command

The macOSXHints tip contains the text of a useful terminal command:

Type this text at the Terminal prompt (or cut and paste it, making sure that any ‘curly’ quotes are staight), and you are rewarded with a list of the offending cards (I had two) which you can resolve yourself:

C. Run a ‘Find Duplicates’ AppleScript

In the comments to the tip you will find an AppleScript for removing duplicates. You may wish to adjust the spelling before using it.

It will trawl through your cards and add any duplicates to a new group called “Duplicate Entries” (or possible “Dupelicate Entries”).

Needless to say, you would of course make a backup of Address Book first, using the “Back up Address Book…” option in the File menu.address book, duplicates, applescript, terminal, tips

Because backing things up is tedious and repetitive, it’s easy to convince yourself that they are not so very important.

Still, it’s hard to imagine a bigger hit to your productivity than losing all your emails, Address Book and iCal data without having a good backup. (If needed, supplement your imagination with this horror story and this one .)

BackityMac is a new utility that makes backing up all your essential data a simple matter of a few clicks. It offers “pre-sets” for Mail.app data, iCal, Address Book and more:

Check the boxes you want, click “backup”. Instead of browsing around for the things that constitute a good backup of Mail (for example), the app does the hard work for you, and delivers it all freshly pressed into a new disk image.

In the event of a disaster, it also offers the option of restoring your data from one of these disk images, again a process of a few mouse clicks. Clever!

As a bonus, a second pane lists some maintenance tasks (and helpful notes on what each one is) that BackityMac can perform:

BackityMac is donation-ware and is available from the developer’s web site .backup, disaster prevention, apple mail, mail.app, ical, address book, helpful apps