A working junk buster
Posted by unbrand on 7 February 2004 | 0 Comments
Last week my mail application, Apple’s Mail, would not start. I had already done the suggested fix, deleting the junk file at ~/Library/Mail/LSMMap2 about 6 times over the past few months. I think the problem is related to a particular junk message arriving in the inbox, namely one with no text. For some reason this junk message completely hoses Mail.
So I start looking for an alternate mail solution. Turns out that BareBones’ Mailsmith cannot handle IMAP message stores, which I use. That was really about the only mail solution I’d consider using because no way in hell am I going to use the bloated Microsuck Entourage. I did notice, though, that Mailsmith comes with SpamSieve. Grudgingly, I went back to using Apple’s Mail hoping that the problems were strictly related to Mail’s inability to deal with certain junk mail.Installing SpamSieve was a breeze, and it’s been running for a couple days now. How’s it doing? According to its own statistics, it’s been 96.2% accurate. It has found 626 spam messages, 28 good messages, 7 false positives (messages that weren’t spam but it thought was spam) and 18 false negatives (messages that really were spam but it didn’t catch). Pretty good.
I’ll leave SpamSieve going for now as it seems to be doing its job. Oh yeah, it’s free for 30 days, then to continue using it you have to pay $25. I think it’s worth it.
What I don’t get is why Apple hasn’t patched Mail to address this issue yet. There are lots of folks on the Apple Support mail forum who have mentioned this problem. Mail is not some random app that people play with for fun on their machines. Email is critically important to many if not most Mac users that I just can’t figure out why Apple has allowed these problems to persist. Ah well. Like a lot of included-with-the-OS apps, you often need to go to 3rd parties to get what you really need.