Michael Tsai’s must-have shareware program, SpamSieve, has just been updated to version 2.9.1. The new version, a 9.1 megabyte download, adds the following fixes and improvements:

- Added support for Microsoft Outlook 2011 SP 2 (a.k.a. 14.2.x). If SpamSieve can detect that you were using Outlook 2011 before, and that SP 2 has been installed, SpamSieve will auto-update its scripts automatically. Otherwise, you can choose Install Outlook Scripts from the SpamSieve menu. Either way, the SpamSieve rules in Outlook will continue to work without modification.

- SpamSieve now tries to detect whether its Apple Mail plug-in is damaged and auto-heal the installed copy if necessary.

- If there’s an error updating SpamSieve’s Apple Mail plug-in, it now reports more information to try to diagnose the problem.

- If the Apple Mail plug-in detects that it’s damaged, it will alert the user to download and install a fresh copy.

- SpamSieve now checksums the Outlook script files (both the installed and built-in copies) to detect whether they are damaged.

- Made a change to eliminate a particular cause of false positives for some users.

- SpamSieve no longer triggers Mac OS X’s “accept incoming network connections” firewall dialog.

- Added some exception guards to work around bugs in the Growl SDK.

- When an unexpected error occurs and no stack trace is available, SpamSieve will now try to report the approximate location.

- Improved the What information should I include when I report a problem? section of the manual.

SpamSieve is available for a US$30 registration fee and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later to run. The new version can either be downloaded directly from the web site or brought up to the current version via the program’s built-in update feature.

If you’ve tried the new version and have any feedback to offer, let us know in the comments.