MacMerc has posted a long and detailed tutorial on setting up a spare Mac (they suggest a Mac mini) to act as your own personal spam killer for an IMAP account.

It requires a spare Mac in the house running at least 10.2, a copy of SpamSieve , an IMAP account and, ideally, a broadband connction.

Although the tutorial looks like a lot of work, the end result will be worth it.

Not only will you be treated to spam-free email on any other Mac you use to access the email account, but the spam killer chugs away at home, giving you spam-free email on any other Windows, Linux or whatnot computer you might use at work or on the road.

More time, as the MacMerc article says, to enjoy those “6-shot Venti Sugar-free Vanilla Skim Extra Caramel Machiattos”. Excellent.

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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).

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Michael Tsai is an indie Mac developer whose products include DropDMG and SpamSieve .

He’s also the publisher of ATPM , a Mac e-zine that’s now in its 12th year.

His main Mac is a Dual 2 GHz G5 with 2.5 GB of RAM and two 20″ Dell 2005FPWs. He says, “I will eventually switch to the 20″ iMac Core Duo that I’m using for testing, but there are some development tools that I haven’t gotten switched over to Intel yet, and I’ll probably wait until DiskWarrior can handle the new partition format.”

HW: How long have you been using Apple Mail? What other clients have you used (and why did you stop)?

MT: I used Emailer 1 and 2 for several years and really liked it, however, database corruption problems prompted me to switch to Outlook Express 4 for a time. Then Mailsmith came out, and I’ve been using it as my main client pretty much ever since. I subscribe to a ton of mailing lists, and I’ve long used a separate client to handle the mailing list mail. For a while that was Eudora, but around the Jaguar timeframe I switched to Apple Mail because, unlike Eudora, it doesn’t store the message data in mangled form.

HW: What plugins and extensions do you use to make your email experience better?

(more…)

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SpamSieve has been updated.

Apple Mail users will experience greater accuracy as SpamSieve gets smarter in general about spammer tricks and as a particular bug affecting accuracy in Mail.app has been corrected.

In addition, the new version features better analysis of attachments, improved phishing detection and faster execution of spam training commands in Tiger and Jaguar.

SpamSieve is available from the developer’s web site and is shareware (USD 25).

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SpamSieve (additional Bayesian spam-protection) joins the list of apps recompiled as universal binaries.

But there’s more. SpamSieve 2.4.1 includes various tweaks to its tokenizer and HTML parser that improve accuracy. It filters messages containing attachments better.

A setting has been added for Mail.app users to control whether messages trained as spam are marked as read and/or left on the server.

Its notification features are smarter and it works better with Pathfinder 4.

It also contains various bug features, a new Spanish localisation and improved documentation.

SpamSieve is shareware (USD 25) and is available from the developer?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s web site.

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So, you’re thinking about buying one of the new Intel Macs announced this week in San Francisco?

I am. There’s a shiny new MacBook Pro with my name on it out there somewhere. Or there will be.

The big question for me is not whether I’ll miss the FW800 port as much as I think I will (probably not), or whether I will kick myself for not waiting for the Rev B (probably), but whether Mail.app with all my favourite things bolted-on will run natively.

So I asked the developers of all the plugins and addons on the Top Ten things every Mail.app user should have list, how ready they were for the Intel Macs. Here’s the good news:

1. MailTags. Scott Morrison says that a universal binary will be available “hopefully” in two weeks. And as Version 1.2 with a killer new feature as well!
2. Mail Act-on. Two weeks will see a universal binary of this plug-in as well.
3. MailAppetizer. This has been a universal binary since July last year. Ready to go.
4. Mail Scripts. This has also been a universal binary since the middle of last year. Andeas Amann says that “the only potential problem might be the “Archive Messages” script since it packages some pre-complied Perl packages as well”. But if any problems exist, they’ll soon be ironed out.
5. Mail Stamps. Version 2.1 was compiled as a universal binary for Intels and PowerPCs. And it worked fine on his developer Intel Mac, Andrew Escobar says.
6. MailUnreadStatusBar. Masaru says that it’s not clear whether this utility will need a recompile or not, “because it isn’t supposed to depend on architecture”. It should work equally well on a PPC or an Intel.
7. JunkMatcher or SpamSieve. Michael Tsai says that at the moment SpamSieve runs in Rosetta with Mail.app and the SpamSieve plug-in running natively. But a recompiled version of SpamSieve is due out in two weeks and will be available as a free upgrade.

   JunkMatcher’s developer Benjamin Han wants to address some issues with his app before recompiling for Intel Macs. Due to time pressures, “it’ll probably be a while”, he says.

8. Take Control of Apple Mail in Tiger. It is my understanding that this excellent ebook will be just as helpful on an Intel Mac as it is now.
9. QuickSilver. Quicksilver and all its plug-ins were recompiled earlier this week.
10. Spell Catcher X. Evan Gross says he will post a recompiled beta of Spell Catcher X next week (when he gets back from MacWorld) that will also contain some new features and few minor bugfixes. The final release will be polished up and available long before most people get their hands on one of the new Macs.

Now there is no excuse for restraint.

You can find a longer list of all recompiled applications that are ready to run natively on VersionTracker’s MacIntel Resource Center.

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