SpamSieve 2.0 Improves Accuracy

Michael Tsai has released SpamSieve 2.0, a major upgrade to his helpful Bayesian filtering-based anti-spam tool (see "Tools We Use: SpamSieve" in TidBITS 667 for a review). SpamSieve 2.0 now integrates with Eudora 6.0 as a plug-in (in both Paid and Sponsored modes, whereas Eudora’s own SpamWatch works only in Paid mode), which makes it significantly easier to use within Eudora. Michael also added an automatically maintained blocklist (the addresses of senders of mail marked as spam) and whitelist (the addresses of senders of mail marked as good); keeping these inside SpamSieve’s database eliminates the need to clutter your address book with unnecessary addresses. A number of tweaks should improve SpamSieve’s accuracy: it now extracts more information from each message, parses HTML better, understands common plain text obfuscations, marks messages with Habeas headers as good, and uses a new method of calculating word probabilities. One final nice touch: SpamSieve now displays the number of good messages from the last mail check on its Dock icon. SpamSieve 2.0 requires Mac OS X 10.1.5 or later with Emailer, Entourage, Eudora 5.2 or later, Mailsmith, and PowerMail. The upgrade is free for registered users; new copies cost $25. It’s available as a 2 MB download that works in trial mode for 30 days or 20 launches.