Does this program do this?

SpamSieve
1

I have recently converted from Windows to Apple. On Windows, I used a system called CA-Antispam which worked as follows.

You installed the program
You pointed it towards your mail folders containing clean mail
It then built a whitelist of e-mail addresses you received mail from
You then pointed it towards your sent items folders
It then built a whitelist of e-mail addresses you sent mail to

And that was it. Nothing clever, just spam filtering based on whitelists. Anything that came in that wasn’t in the whitelist it marked as Spam. You then went into the spam folder, put a checkbox next to all the mail you wanted and it then moved them back into their respective folders, and then added the email addresses to the whitelist.

Any e-mails you sent, the To: address was also automagically added to the whitelist.

Does this program do this? If so, i’ll happily spend the 30 bucks.

I have personal antispam x5 at the minute, but it’s not quite what I want.

Many thanks!

2

SpamSieve does have a whitelist, which it automatically maintains, and you can turn off the other filters if you want, but it’s not designed to work the way you describe. You seem to want everything not on the whitelist to be presumed to be spam. SpamSieve works the other way: whitelist messages are automatically good, it moves the ones it thinks are spam to a separate mailbox, and anything that’s not spam is presumed to be good and allowed to flow to your other rules and mailboxes.

I suggest that you take advantage of the 30-day demo to try SpamSieve as it was designed to work. I think you’ll find that the Bayesian filtering works much better than just a whitelist, whereby “better” I mean that fewer manual actions are required, and you don’t find good messages from new senders in the spam mailbox all the time.

3

Ok, so this system adds in an extra element which in my logic is that before committing e-mail not in the whitelist to the spam bin, it then applies some of the filtering your describe to guess if mail is good or not. If not, off to the spam bin it goes.

Does this system generate a whitelist automatically? Does it look just at an inbox or sent items also?

4

It generates a whitelist automatically from your address book, from messages that you’ve told it are good, and from incoming messages that it thought were good and that you didn’t train as spam.

It can also whitelist based on the recipients of your sent messages. The way this works varies depending on which mail program you’re using.