If you ever stop blogging for a bit due to an insane period in your Real Life, you will notice that eventually collections of interesting things begin to pile up in your inbox.

Over the last little while, three helpful on-line tutorials have appeared which offer Mail.app users extra tips on smart mailboxes, spam protection and setting up IMAP accounts.

Merlin Mann at 43Folders has written up some good tips on smart mailboxes , how to make them and how to use them to make yourself more productive. He includes screenshots of some useful smart mailbox setups which are ripe for copying or for sparking off your own thinking about how smart mailboxes could make your life easier.

Macinstruct writer Matthew Cone explains how Mail.app users can better protect themselves from spam by outlining the main methods for catching spam, how Apple Mail’s “latent semantic analysis” spam filter works and how to make the best use of it. Finally, the explains how to set up SpamSieve for those who need extra Bayesian protection.

Dan Rubin has discovered that “a surprisingly large number of people don’t know all the steps involved in properly configuring an IMAP account in Apple’s Mail.app.” He plugs the gap with a “mini-tutorial” on get it right, including Mail.app’s mysterious ” Use this mailbox for…” option which trips a lot of people up.

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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 ]

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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:

1. Ten Mac Tools for Getting Things Done
2. 292 different Apple Mail icons
3. Another Mail.app rule to catch image spam
4. Top ten things every Mail.app user should have
5. Getting Things Done in Apple Mail

My favourites

1. “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.
2. Hacking Quicksilver’s Cube interface for bigger icons - Get readable icons for Quicksilver’s new(ish) Cube interface.
3. Rebuild your database and speed up Mail.app - Simple steps to a speed and space increase.
4. Get your hands on Mail 3.0 now - Getting Tiger Mail’s new features now.
5. Roll your own Mail.app stamp icon - A template for creating a Mail stamp icon of your very own.

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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.

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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 .

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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”.

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