You can’t knock a useful chunk of shareware.
Michael Tsai’s must-have shareware program, SpamSieve, has just been updated to version 2.9.6. The new version, a 10.7 megabyte download, adds the following fixes and changes:
– Worked around a bug in Mac OS X 10.8.2 that could cause spam operations in Postbox to be very slow. If you’re using Postbox, you can update your SpamSieve plug-in by following steps 1 through 6 in the Setting Up Postbox section of the manual.
– Made various changes to improve SpamSieve’s filtering accuracy.
– SpamSieve now understands that @icloud.com, @me.com, and @mac.com are equivalent, so it’s better that finding the proper inbox in Apple Mail when you train a message as good. (For non-Apple IMAP and POP mail accounts, you can define aliases manually, as before. Go to the Accounts tab of Mail’s preferences and enter all the addresses – separated by commas – in the Email Address field.)
– Customers have reported that Sync Services does not work reliably on Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. Thus, rather than having Outlook use Sync Services to sync its contacts with the system address book, SpamSieve now offers a feature to load the Outlook address book directly. (This ensures that SpamSieve doesn’t mark messages from people in your address book as spam.) Outlook users are encouraged to make sure that Use Entourage/Outlook address book is checked in SpamSieve’s preferences and to click the Load button. For more information, see the Use Entourage/Outlook address book section of the manual.
– SpamSieve is now better able to handle invalid data received from a mail program.
– When Using a Spam Mailbox on the Server, SpamSieve is better at handling errors from Mail that could cause a trained spam message to go to the local spam mailbox instead.
– Training a message as good in Apple Mail now removes any flags, in case you were using Spam Message Colors in Apple Mail.
– Added How should I configure the junk filter on my mail server? to the FAQ.
– The Automatically Deleting Old Spam Messages section of the manual now includes instructions for Outlook.
– Worked around various file permissions problems that could prevent training in Apple Mail from working.
– Worked around a bug in Migration Assistant that could prevent SpamSieve from working properly with Apple Mail.
– The plug-in and scripts installers are better able to handle non-standard folder structures.
– Fixed a bug where SpamSieve was unable to see the contents of certain malformed messages, leading to poor filtering accuracy.
– Fixed a bug where sometimes setting the date in the Statistics window didn’t work when SpamSieve was running in 64-bit mode.
– Fixed a regression where where messages trained as good in Apple Mail didn’t move back to the inbox if you were using a local spam mailbox and no inbox matched the message’s recipients.
– Made various improvements to the manual.
SpamSieve retails for US$30.00 and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later to install and run.
If you’ve tried the new version and have any feedback, please let us know in the comments.