Spam is an incredibly annoying problem for me on my Mac, and I get several hundred junk emails a day. For a while, Mail’s inbuilt spam filtering did a great job and caught the vast majority of my junk mail. However, recently it seems that more and more emails are getting through - to the extent I’ll find myself deleting around 10 junk mails per 1 valid one. I’d resorted to living with that for a while, unaware that another solution existed.

I stumbled across SpamSieve a few days ago, and haven’t looked back. It took about 15 minutes to set up and install - and I’ve tweaked a few settings etc since installing it - but on the whole it’s a very user friendly program. It integrates really well with Mail, and after filtering a good few thousand messages so far it’s only come back with 5 or 6 false positives. To be that accurate from the word go is very impressive.

I’m still using the trial version at the moment, but $30 will be a tiny price to pay for the time it will save me filtering through my inbox through all the junk and rubbish.

It also lead me to discover another Mac app called Growl. This is a system wide notification system, which basically means lots of applications use it to tell you when things are happening. SpamSieve notifies you of new emails, Transmit tells you when file downloads and uploads are complete, Skype notifies you of people logging on and off. I can’t believe I hadn’t come across this before, and it’s certainly being added to my list of incredibly useful Mac applications.

Growl in action