Maria’s Guides

A spam filter plugin for Mac users.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been getting a TON of spam e-mail lately — much of it to my .mac e-mail account. Most of it falls into one of a few categories:

• Stock “recommendations.”
• Award announcements.
• Letters from widows or businessmen in Nigeria.
• Offers for sex-enhancing drugs and devices.
• Porn sites.

Neither my e-mail server nor my Mail application (Apple Mail) seems able to weed out this crap. So it ends up in my In box for me to manually delete. What a pain in the butt.

Enter SpamSieve. This Mac OS plugin, which works with most common e-mail clients — Mail, Entourage, Eudora, and others — uses Bayesian filtering to identify and weed out spam. You train it, from within your e-mail program, to know what’s spam and what’s not. It works with your Address Book so it won’t mark a message from your mother (or editor or boss) as spam. And it maintains a database of internal rules that help it identify spam — rules you have easy access to and can change at will.

I installed SpamSieve on my PowerBook yesterday and it immediately began working — even before I had a chance to start training it! Installation isn’t difficult, but you’ll need to follow the instructions in the PDF manual that comes with SpamSieve to get it right. If everything is set up properly, SpamSieve training commands will appear in your application’s menus, as shown here. Then, every time you launch your e-mail client, SpamSieve also opens. It works in the background, moving messages identified as spam to a special Spam mailbox or folder, allowing you to train it to recognize spam or tell it that a message it thinks is spam really isn’t. When you’re finished working with e-mail and Quit, SpamSieve automatically quits, too.

Interested in seeing how SpamSieve is doing? You can check out its statistics. Here’s what it looks like on my PowerBook; keep in mind that I check a limited number of e-mail accounts from this computer so it hasn’t had much to work with. The percent accuracy should get higher as I continue training SpamSieve; the manual recommends that you train until it has processed 1,000 messages for the best results.

Now, instead of dreading mail collections, I look forward to them. I’m always curious to see how SpamSieve does. So far, I haven’t been disappointed. It’s doing a better job than my ISP and Mail’s junk filter.

SpamSieve is shareware and costs $30. There’s a 30-day trial period and the software is fully-functional during this time. You can set it up and give it a good tryout for a few weeks before making the small investment in its purchase.

If you do try it, take a moment to stop back here and share your comments about it. I think other readers might benefit from more opinions than just mine.

I add a plugin to display random “Words to Life By” on my site.

Every once in a while, I’ll hear or read a quote I think is particularly profound and want to share it with others on my site. I’d been doing this for months with the “Words of Wisdom” block near the bottom of the sidebar on the Home page. I listed three quotes there — one of which was the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which is rather long. I knew that if I kept adding quotes, the block would be much larger than it should and the quotes would lose their impact.

Enter Random Quotes (or WP-Quotes), a plugin by Dustin Barnes. This plugin enables you to maintain a database of quotes within your WordPress database, using WordPress’s administrative interface to enter and edit quotes. You then place a line of code in a template file (in my case, sidebar.php) to display a random (or specific) quote.

I tweaked my Web site this morning to add this feature and I’m very happy with it. Setup went smoothly, although I did have to fiddle around a bit with the style.css file to get the quotes to look right. (My trick: assign the same style definitions to the quote styles as my sidebar list styles.) Only one quote displays at a time and I’ve set it up to display on the Home page only. You’ll find it near the bottom of the sidebar, under “Words to Live By.”

Now all I need to do is gather some more good quotes.