SpamSieve for Mac
Robust spam filter for major email clients.
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SpamSieve overview
SpamSieve is a robust spam filter for major email clients that uses powerful Bayesian spam filtering.
SpamSieve understands what your spam looks like in order to block it all, but also learns what your legitimate messages look like to avoid confusion. SpamSieve only marks spam in your email client so you never lose any mail.
The following is a partial list of SpamSieve’s features, so that you can quickly see what it can do and how it’s unique:
- Powerful Bayesian spam filtering results in high accuracy and almost no false positives. It adapts to the mail that you receive to get even better with time. Some other e-mail programs include Bayesian filters, but SpamSieve is more accurate.
- Integrates with your e-mail program for a superior user experience. Plus, you get the same great filtering if you ever switch e-mail programs or use more than one at a time.
- SpamSieve works with any mail provider/host. It filters all your mail accounts. There is no extra charge for additional addresses or devices.
- SpamSieve running on your Mac can keep the spam off your iPhone/iPad, and you can even train SpamSieve from afar.
- Colors show how spammy each message is, so you can quickly focus on the borderline ones if you want to check SpamSieve’s work.
- Integrates with the macOS Contacts app (and also Eudora’s and Entourage’s address books) so that messages from friends and colleagues are never marked as spam.
- Automatically maintains a blocklist so that it can instantly adapt to spam messages sent from particular addresses, and catch 100% of them.
- Automatically maintains a whitelist to guarantee that messages from particular senders or mailing lists are never marked as spam, without cluttering your address book with these addresses.
- You can customize the whitelist and blocklist, adding sophisticated rules that match various message headers, or the message body. The rules can match text in a variety of ways, including using regular expressions.
- Can use the Habeas Safelist, which indicates messages that are not spam, as well as the "ADV" subject tag indicating that a message is spam.
- Many spammers encode the contents of their messages so that filters cannot see the incriminating words they contain. SpamSieve can decode and look inside these messages. Optionally it can mark them all as spam, on the theory that legitimate senders do not try to obscure their messages.
- SpamSieve keeps track of how accurate it is, how many good and spam messages you receive, and how these numbers change over time.
- Turn off new-mail notification in your e-mail program, and let SpamSieve notify you only when you receive non-spam messages.
- The corpus window and log let you see how each spam message was caught.
- Unlike server-based spam filtering services, your mail data stays on your own Mac, so your privacy is preserved.
- SpamSieve supports AppleScript, so you can connect it to additional apps and fully integrate it into a custom workflow.
What’s new in version 3.0.5
Apple Mail
- Preliminary testing shows that SpamSieve is compatible with macOS 15 Sequoia Developer Beta 2. Further updates may be required when Apple updates Mail in a subsequent Sequoia beta.
- Worked around some problems where Mail could temporarily hang during spam filtering if the network connection was very slow or when encountering a macOS bug where Mail redownloads messages that have already been downloaded. If SpamSieve detects that Mail is slow reading a message, it will postpone filtering for a while to give it time to finish downloading everything. It can also help to go to Mail ‣ Settings ‣ Accounts ‣ Account Information and set Download Attachments to All for each account. This will encourage Mail to fully download messages right away.
- The Filter Now button in Settings ‣ Apple Mail ‣ Filtering can now be used to manually filter the Mail inboxes, even when automatic filtering is disabled or postponed.
- Worked around an issue where sometimes filtering in Mail didn’t work because Mail was so bogged down that it couldn’t read the inboxes for SpamSieve in a timely manner.
- The mailbox outline for Filter spam messages in other mailboxes now recognizes the lowercase spam and junk names as being for mailboxes that should not be filtered.
- Fixed a bug where SpamSieve would try to repair files related to Mail plug-ins when running on macOS 14, which doesn’t support plug-ins.
- Fixed a bug where updating certain settings could cause a spurious error to be logged if you were not using the Mail plug-in.
- Improved the error reporting to track down a Mail AppleScript issue when finding new messages to filter.
Microsoft Outlook
- The Settings ‣ Outlook ‣ Setup window clarifies that, when using Enable spam filtering for Inbox, the non-spam messages left in the inbox are marked with the Good category after SpamSieve has processed them.
Settings
- Fixed a bug where the notification score slider was too narrow on macOS 10.13.
- Modernized the editable text fields to use shaded bezels instead of solid lines.
- Secondary label text throughout the user interface now uses the modern gray coloring.
Icons
- Due to a macOS bug, clicking the SpamSieve menu bar icon does not show the menu when the Mac has multiple displays, a window on the secondary display is full screen, and you are clicking the menu bar icon on that display. You can work around this by accessing the SpamSieve commands in another way (e.g. via the keyboard shortcuts or the menu bar icon on the main display) or by unchecking Show Dock icon in the settings.
- Fixed a bug where the application icon in the Dock or Command-Tab switcher could appear pixellated when it was badged to show that SpamSieve was in the process of filtering or training a message.
General
- SpamSieve now disables automatic filtering for Apple Mail and Outlook when the Mac is not connected to the Internet, to avoid hangs that could occur when trying to read messages that can’t be downloaded from the server.
- The Open in External Viewer command now works in the Corpus and Log windows when the table view has a selected message but doesn’t have keyboard focus.
- Improved the error reporting when a database can’t be accessed because the disk is full.
- Worked around a problem where SpamSieve could crash if Core Data’s conflict resolution failed because the database file was damaged.
- Made various updates for macOS 15, Xcode 16, and Swift 6.
Documentation
- Improved the following sections of the manual:
SpamSieve for Mac
$39.99
In English
Version 3.0.5
What users say about SpamSieve
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(186 Reviews of SpamSieve)
Comments
User Ratings
Oct 20 2023
Version: 3.0.1
Thanks for version 3.01. Version 3.0 failed to filter a lot of spam from an old email address. Version 3.01 fixed it straight away. Brilliant!
Oct 7 2023
Version: 3.0
This app has tremendous value especially when we get inundated with spam. To date it has trapped all mail not based on my whitelist. It easily lets you identify what it might have considered spam by telling the system that particular mail was "Good". And the most important thing was when I had a learning issue, the support was fast and phenomenal. The developer was johnny on the spot helping me learn what I did to cause the issue. I highly recommend this app for those of you sick of being spammed and phished.
Sep 25 2023
Version: 3.0
Whenever I open Apple Mail, 2 (two) SpamSieve dialogue boxes appear, which terrorized me ! Obviously, I'll kindly put Spamsieve in the trash...
Sep 24 2023
Version: 3.0
If you have old email addresses that are literally bombed with spam, SpamSieve is a godsend. But the trouble with spam is that it will never end and that you can't avoid checking false positives or negatives. I've tried to stick for years to the typical jefferson.smith@senat.com (sample ;)) but in the end I reluctantly had to change my address. Spammers mostly use the same old databases, so if your address was created more than ten years ago, you're very lucky if it's not in those databases (same for your old password if you never changed it). Sometimes it's better to cut a leg than to try and cure it...
Mar 11 2023
Version: 2.9.52
For me, it didn't work. I even copied into the Blacklist of the application about 90 addresses that send me SPAM. Well, it's stayed just the same as before. I complied point by point with the fairly complicated instructions, and... nothing.
