Beating spam with JunkMatcher (Macs)

[Stonehead]

I've been using an anti-spam app and filters called JunkMatcher for the past week (it plugs in to Mac Mail and uses Mail rules).

I thought I'd flag up how good it is. It's much more powerful and trainable than the basic Mac Mail spam filtering, but much easier to use than some of the opposition.

Despite the best efforts of my ISP and existing spam filters I was still getting five or six spams slip through a day. Now, they're all getting picked up.

On top of it's efficiency, JunkMatcher has one other big plus - it's free.

So if you're a Mac user it's well worth trying and, if you like getting beneath the bonnet, you can do further configuration yourself or, as it's open source, play with the code.

I don't usually plug software, but this really is a useful tool to fight the spammers.

[Andy Hamilton]

cheers for that might be worth a go, the built in spam filter is quite good I get about 100 - 200 spam emails a day generally and normally about 10-20 get through. If it is that efficient though does it mean that some every day emails get caught up in it? It is quite important to me to still get emails from strangers about the site.

[Stonehead]

I've found it very trainable - it uses Mail rules to shift spam to your Junk folder. If you decide to label it "Not Junk", it automatically updates the JunkMatcher rules and white list.

The reverse also applies.

If you control click on the suspect email in Mail, you get the option to open it in JunkMatcher where you can examine the email in more detail and see why it's been flagged up (or not). You can then fine-tune the configuration.

In the week I've been using it, it hasn't yet flagged up non-spam as spam but it has caught spam that would have got through Mail's filters. As a precaution, I've disabled the delete junk on quit rule so I can double-check but if it keeps going like this I'll re-instate it in about a fortnight.