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JunkMatcher: SpamBayes for Apple Mail

One of the major reasons for my recent flirtation with Mailsmith is the fact that I’ve started having spam messages show up in my Inbox. Not a lot of them, and only one at a time. But still, Apple Mail is supposed to be filtering these things out. Having them show up is annoying. And going through the Hawk Wings archive I stumbled across an entry mentioning JunkMatcher, it looked interesting so I decided to give it a try.

First off, I want to mention Michael Tsai’s Spam Sieve. Spam Sieve gets a lot of love from Bare Bones Software, Daring Fireball, But She’s a Girl, and a lot of other places with opinions I place value in. But Spam Sieve has a really big problem that prevents me from using it: it wants to live in my Dock.

My Dock is set up to contain the Applications I use most often, it also contains any other GUI apps that happen to be running. That’s it. I know my Dock icons, I know why each and every one of them is in the Dock. Telling me I have to accept a new icon into my Dock is a very bold move. Telling me I have to accept an icon for something I don’t think should need an icon is an even bolder one.

Spam Sieve (and JunkMatcher) provide enhanced spam filtering to Apple Mail. This is a task that should go on in the background. Thus, it shouldn’t have a GUI, and thus it shouldn’t have an icon on the Dock. If I have to interact with the app, then yes, it should launch a GUI app and that can have an icon. The icon will remind me to quit the config app after I’m done configuring. Spam Sieve wants to be running all the time. It wants a permanent place in the Dock. I don’t want to give up real estate that valuable to what should be an FBA (Faceless Background Application, a.k.a. daemon). And I sure as heck don’t want to have to pay money for the privilege.

JunkMatcher thus has two big advantages over Spam Sieve: it’s free and it doesn’t want a place in my Dock. It has a GUI app, but that only runs for configuration, the actual filtering happens behind the scenes completely GUI-less. That pretty much sold me on JunkMatcher right there. In fact, the only way it could get itself uninstalled would be to not provide enhanced Spam Filtering. And considering that’s its raison d’être, failure in that respect would be a damn good reason for uninstalling.

So, I downloaded and installed it.

The first thing I did after launching JunkMatcher was quit it, dive into it’s bundle looking for its .nib files and switch the Analyzer Window over to the unified look. Apparently I really dislike the old toolbar look, good to know.

Then I launched Mail and, boom, two messages got flagged as spam. I know this because when JunkMatcher set up its rules in Mail for catching spam, it failed to carry over the modification I had made to the stock spam rule: I had added an action to mark spam as read after it was put into the Junk Mail folder. Those two messages were marked unread. It was a simple enough fix, I just altered the Built-In and JunkMatcher rules to mark spam as read.

I recently got around to emptying Mail’s Junk Mail folder. Which meant that I only had 36 spam messages to train the SpamBayes engine with rather than 22,000 or so. But I forged on regardless and trained with what I had. The I found another 2700 spams in the trash, so I trained them too (along with 3500 ‘ham’ messages from my Archive folder.)

Now it’s just a matter of leaving it well enough alone and waiting to see if any more spam shows up in my Inbox or if it shows up in Junk Mail flagged as such by Junk Matcher.

This entry was posted on 18 October 2005 at 02:20 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.