Why You Need This Mac App Spam Filter Instead Of Apple’s Junk Mail

There area a handful of ways to get rid of email spam on your Mac. Don’t use email works every time. Keep your email addresses to a minimum. Use a junk mail filter to segregate email spam from your regular email.

Spam is so prevalent that Apple gives Mac users a Junk Mail filter. While it’s better than nothing, it also doesn’t seem to work well after a year or so. I thought junk mail filters were supposed to learn over time. Junk Mail on my Mac has learned how to ignore my pleas to stop allowing spam to get through, and to stop blocking good email addresses.

What we did to remove email spam as an ongoing problem was much simpler than deleting all email accounts.

Filter Email Before It Gets To Your Inbox

This was actually too easy. Once I installed SpamSieve on my Mac, almost all the spam that used to hit the inbox hit the spam filter and the spam mailbox instead.

Man, that was easy. SpamSieve doesn’t kill spam but it segregates it better than Apple’s built-in Junk Mail filter. And, it actually learns over time, and you can train it manually, too.

Setup is not difficult. SpamSieve starts up when Mail starts up so it runs unattended. Preferences abound, but nothing that’s cumbersome to setup.

SpamSieve tracks every incoming email message and compares it with a variety of known patterns. For example, it can compare messages with your Address Book’s email addresses.

There’s also white list and black list protection. Notifications go beyond Apple’s Mail sounds. You can have SpamSieve display the number of good email messages in the Dock icon, rather than all incoming email.

There’s even a slider bar to initiate a more aggressive spam catching strategy (which also means it may mark legitimate email as spam).

Once you setup SpamSieve it’s mostly set it and forget. If an email spam gets through, use the pull down menu in Mail to train the massage as spam. If you find a legitimate message is marked as spam, again, train it right within Mail. It’s a click.

Whatever the folks who make SpamSieve are doing, it works. The price is modest (Apple’s built-in Junk Mail filter is free, but problematic at times) and updates are frequent.