Having trouble getting SpamSieve to identify spam

[bernesebernese]

I have Mac OS 10.4.11 and use Entourage. I've been religiously identifying each email as either "good" or "spam" since May 26. Maybe 1 in 20 or 1 in 30 spam emails gets identified and placed in my junk e-mail file.

I'm getting next to no false positives but the false negatives are so overwhelmingly high that I'm wondering why I keep doing this. Interestingly, the "statistics" state that SpamSieve accuracy is 97.9% correct. Given that I'm tagging more than 2/3 of incoming emails as spam (that were not so identified by SpamSieve) - how could it be considered 97.9% accurate?

I have checked the box next to everything under "filters", including "encoded HTML mail is spam" but to no avail.

I'm about ready to give up but I'm so buried by spam that I'd like to make this work.

BTW - the system seems to only check the "sender" - since the real spam senders use a different sender each time, this it totally ineffective for 99% of the spam. Would it make more sense to search for repeating words in the subject line.

I hope you can help.

[Michael Tsai]

Interestingly, the "statistics" state that SpamSieve accuracy is 97.9% correct. Given that I'm tagging more than 2/3 of incoming emails as spam (that were not so identified by SpamSieve) - how could it be considered 97.9% accurate?

SpamSieve’s accuracy is determined by the number of messages it classified correctly and the total number of messages that it classified. Your Entourage is setup such that it isn’t letting SpamSieve see all of the messages. On the ones that SpamSieve sees, it’s 97.9% accurate. So, the fix is to make sure Entourage is showing SpamSieve all of the incoming messages.

You can tell whether SpamSieve examined a message by looking at the log. To fix the setup, make sure that your Entourage rule(s) for SpamSieve are exactly as shown in the manual and that they’re at the top of the rule list. If you are using Entourage’s Mailing List Manager, make sure that it isn’t preventing any messages from being spam-filtered. More information about this is here.

the system seems to only check the "sender"

That’s not true at all. It examines the entire message contents.

[bernesebernese]

To fix the setup, make sure that your Entourage rule(s) for SpamSieve are exactly as shown in the manual and that they’re at the top of the rule list. If you are using Entourage’s Mailing List Manager, make sure that it isn’t preventing any messages from being spam-filtered.

I think the problem was that I didn't have the Entourage rule at the top of the list - I had added the secondary rule suggested in the instructions and inadvertantly placed that one first, before the main Entourage rule. I fixed that and it seems to be working much better now. It is a great program.

Thanks so much!