Playing nice with MobileMe syncing?

I thoroughly loved SS when I had just one machine. I had reduced my spam to about nil. When I got two, and ventured into IMAP on a private server, it became problematic. The whole drone thing was difficult. When I got on MobileMe, it seems I must have disabled SS, thinking Apple was doing a pretty good job of filtering spam. Well, they’re not, and when I got the email today about 2.7.4, it made me long for the good old, clean inbox days when SS “just worked.” I am wondering if there is a simple way to get back onto SS, with MM syncing my two machines, and have my inbox clean again. The drone idea didn’t work well, as I recall, because of the syncing of rules, or some such. Any simple ways to get my life back?

There are basically four ways to use SpamSieve with multiple Macs that share an IMAP account:

  1. Install SpamSieve on only one of the Macs. All the training is done from that Mac.
  2. Install SpamSieve using the drone setup on one Mac. The other Mac does not have SpamSieve installed, but you can train it remotely using the special mailboxes.
  3. Install SpamSieve on both Macs and turn off auto-training in the preferences.
  4. Install SpamSieve on both Macs. Take care to (a) only have SpamSieve running on one Mac at a time, and (b) if SpamSieve makes a mistake, be sure to correct it from the Mac that filtered that message.

(1) and (2) require the Macs to be setup differently, so you would want to turn off MobileMe syncing of Mail’s rules. (3) and (4) will work with syncing. (3) is easier to manage, but the filtering accuracy will be better with (4).

A final option would be to do (1) with MobileMe syncing of rules only occasionally turned on. You could turn it on after making changes to your rules, then turn it off, and then make sure that the SpamSieve rule is unchecked on the Mac that doesn’t have SpamSieve installed.