Hawk Wings » Junk

SpamSieve gets Thunderbird support

Tim Gaden — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 00:33:31 +0000

Michael Tsai has released an updated version of his spam-catching utility, SpamSieve, which adds support for Thunderbird and many other improvements.

Each update brings improvements to the way SpamSieve detects junk mail, and 2.6 is no exception, promising better detection of image spam, phishing scams and more accurate operation of the app’s Bayesian filter.

In addition, it now enables Growl notifications by default, has “improved compatibility with pre-release versions of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard” and features a “more robust” Apple Mail plugin.

Michael lists many other improvements in the full changelog.

SpamSieve is shareware (USD 30) and is available from Michael’s web site .

[via MacNN ]mail.app. apple mail, junk, spam, thunderbird, email, leopardSimilar Posts:

Christmas cheer: No image spam for me

Tim Gaden — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 11:05:00 +0000

Excellent!mail.app, apple mail, image spam, junk, rules, tipsSimilar Posts:

Hawk Wings Greatest Hits 2006

Tim Gaden — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 10:42:38 +0000

It’s that time of year again.

Here are two lists of greatest hits for the year: the five stories that readers liked the most (that is, the five stories with the highest number of page impressions) and the five stories that I liked the most or felt made the greatest contribution to the themes of the blog:

Readers’ favourites:

My favourites

“Talking Mail.app” series wrap up – Merlin Mann, John Gruber, Leander Kahney, Drunken Batman and many more on what’s good about Mail and what sucks.
Hacking Quicksilverâ€™s Cube interface for bigger icons – Get readable icons for Quicksilver’s new(ish) Cube interface.
Rebuild your database and speed up Mail.app – Simple steps to a speed and space increase.
Get your hands on Mail 3.0 now – Getting Tiger Mail’s new features now.
Roll your own Mail.app stamp icon – A template for creating a Mail stamp icon of your very own.

mail.app, apple mail, productivity, quicksilver, icons, spam, getting things done, GTD, tips, junkSimilar Posts:

Another Mail.app rule to catch image spam

Tim Gaden — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 13:30:36 +0000

A poster on macOSXHints has described a rule designed to block the current plague of image-bearing spam.

It’s an improvement, perhaps, on the image spam catching rule I posted three months ago.

Having read the post and the suggestion in the comments, I’ve tweaked my rule for this a bit.

It now looks like this:

Most of the image spam I get contains a GIF file.

I like the idea of setting the colour to a particular colour so that I can see at a glance which messages the rule has moved. It gives a warm fuzzy feeling and it helps me to scan quickly for false positives. mail.app, apple mail, spam, junk, image spam, cads and bounders, rules, tipsSimilar Posts:

SidewinderX: Automated spam reporting

Tim Gaden — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 10:43:35 +0000

SidewinderX is an automated spam and phishing scam reporting tool.

At the click of an applescript it will process your Junk mailbox, determine the sending domain of all the junk mails inside it and report them to the abuse contact of that domain.

A new version (1.0.5), released a few days ago, includes scripts to automate the reporting for Mail.app, Entourage, Mailsmith, Eudora, and Powermail.

You can see a helpful screencast of how it works on the developer’s web site .

No doubt it’s clever; the real question is, is it smart?

Debate continues. Despite some miracle stories on the results of bouncing spam emails, there are some reasons why bouncing (or automated spam reporting) may not be a good idea.

You can read them in previous Hawk Wings post on “To bounce or not to bounce?” here and here.

Apple’s own technote on tries to distinguish between spam worth bouncing (or reporting) and spam that is not.

SidewinderX is sharware (USD 19.95) and is available from the developer’s web site .mail.app, apple mail, applescript, spam, junk, entourage, mailsmith, eudora, powermail, reportingSimilar Posts:

Spam-busting: Mail.app and Thunderbird compared

Tim Gaden — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 13:07:00 +0000

The poster at The Spam Chronicles is looking at how various programs and services handle (or don’t handle) spam.

First off, he compares Mail and Thunderbird by testing how well they process 109 spam emails released from his Gmail account.

The junk controls on both clients were reset at the start of the test.

He discovered that Mail flagged 42 of them as spam and missed 67 for a 39% success rate. Thunderbird faired better: it flagged all 109 as spam when its junk mail controls were run on the Inbox.

He them tried again with 61 spam emails from his Yahoo account and found that Mail.app “flagged 23 as spam while delivering 17 to the inbox for a 56% success rate” while Thunderbird again flagged them all when its filter was run on the Inbox.

He concludes:

Apple Mail starts with a more conservative approach in order to avoid falsely flagging e-mail as spam. In Apple Mail the spam filter is on my default. Thunderbird starts off with an aggressive filter but the spam filter is off by default and must be enabled.

Of course, this is not a neutral statistical sample sound for all eternity, nor is it fair to judge the clients on untrained filters, but the result is still interesting.

In another post he compares how a wider variety of web-based and Desktop email clients handled a week of spam, covering Yahoo!, .Mac’s webmail, Gmail, AOL, Apple Mail, Thunderbird and more.

There he finds out that on “the first day Apple Mail caught 10 and missed 10 junk mails. After that initial training it improved dramatically catching 6 and missing 1.”

For .Mac, he makes a perceptive observation: “.Mac mail does not have any web based spam filter, at least not visible to the user”. Nonetheless, “typically, only 1/2 the junk email appeared in my mailbox”.mail.app, apple mail, thunderbird, email, spam, junk, gmail, aol, yahoo, dotmac, .MacSimilar Posts:

A Freudian slip

Tim Gaden — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 13:01:15 +0000

Every now and then you run across something in NetNewsWire that makes you chuckle.

I love Mail.app to death, but I am willing to admit that its IMAP support is less robust than it could be.

So the clever irony of this Freudian slip in a blogger’s headline struck me at once:

Sometimes Mail does frantically spin its wheels without getting anywhere. It needs a thrash folder.

However, the post he references on setting up Mail’s special IMAP folders for Sent, Drafts, Trash and Junk mail is excellent. Not knowing about this is a source of frustration to a lot of people on the Apple Discussion Boards and elsewhere.humour, mail.app, apple mail, imap, special folders, sent, drafts, junk, trash, IMAPSimilar Posts:

Image spam surge powered by Russian bot-net

Tim Gaden — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 12:20:49 +0000

Reports on eWeek.com and on SearchSecurity.com claim that a highly sophisticated Russian bot-net is pumping out the current surge in image spam.

According to a senior security researcher at SecureWorks, the bot-netters grew their 70,000 strong zombie network with the SpamThru trojan, an innovative piece of malware which not only packs its own pirated version of Kaspersky Anti-Virus to eradicate any competing malware from infected computers, but also uses a list of proxy servers to evade blacklisting by anti-spam agencies.

The researcher also claims to have uncovered evidence that the spammers harvested lists of email addresses from financial institutions:

It also appears the spammer made an effort to obtain more targeted lists of email addresses by hacking into smaller investment news Web sites and other e-businesses and downloading their user databases,” he said. “This is likely due to the fact that pump-and-dump stock spam seems to be a primary motive of the botnet.

Mail.app users can get some level of protection by creating a rule to filter some of these images spams out.

David Reitter takes a slightly different approach with a different rule.

Fastmail users (and others with tweakable server-side spam protection) may get some extra relief from this tip on EmailDiscussions.com which creates a more sophisticated rule.

[Via Daring Fireball ]mail.app, apple mail, image spam, junk, rules, email, bot-net, trojanSimilar Posts:

Mail.app and SpamAssassin in spam-catching harmony

Tim Gaden — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 10:32:58 +0000

Adrian Sutton describes how he has set up SpamAssassin and Mail’s inbuilt Junk Filter to work together for extra spam-catching cleverness.

Having set up both SpamAssassin and Mail to dump their spam in Mail.app’s Junk folder, he runs SpamAssassin’s sa-learn script in a cron job so that it learns from what Mail’s Junk filter catches as well.

Running sa-learn –ham on Mail’s Inbox after returns false positives with Mail’s “Not Junk” button, helps SpamAssassin learn what’s not spam.

As a result, he has “a partially self-training system with a user-friendly interface”.mail.app, apple mail, spam, junk, tips, junk filter, self-trainingSimilar Posts:

Cleaning up Mail’s Previous Recipients List

Tim Gaden — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 13:14:55 +0000

Mail keeps a list of all the email addresses for people you have emailed.

It doesn’t discriminate. Even the ones you typed in incorrectly get stored and will pop up in Mail’s auto-complete drop-down menu for ever after. That’s annoying and it slows you down.

It’s Spring in Australia, so I’ve been spring cleaning Mail (See “Spring cleaning to regain disk space”).

Cleaning out the Previous Recipients list is part of the drill. It’s a good idea to do this from time to time, not only to clean out the duds, but also because:

Apple Mail’s Junk Filter will not mark an email as junk if it comes from an address in your Previous Recipients list. Along with the Address Book, it functions as a de facto “white list”. Keeping it up to date helps Mail to find junk better

It’s quite fun to go through the list and wonder who all these people are that you have emailed at least once.

You can find it under the Windows menu.

It presents you with a list of the names, email addresses and the date of the last email sent:

I cleaned out 53 addresses this time around. I’m not sure if it actually speeds Mail up, but it feels faster and the annoying mistakes no longer appear in the drop-down list for me to wade through. mail.app, apple mail, previous recipients, spring cleaning, productivity, tips, junkSimilar Posts: