General Questions

I travel frequently and need access to e-mail messages - even those I have previously read and filed - from whatever computer is available, whether my laptop in the airport at Albuquerque or a desktop in an Internet cafe in Paris. I also need to access via my Palm Treo, leaving messages I’ve read on the server until I can deal with them later back in the office. SBC/Yahoo, which I currently use, has awful spam filters and that understates the problem. Am looking at alternatives, and David Pogue’s strong recommendation for SpamSieve must be considered. Does SpamSieve work in concert with a web-based system that will allow me to leave messages on the server? If not, any suggestions? Thanks.

SpamSieve does not work directly with Web-based e-mail. Instead, it integrates with e-mail programs such as Apple Mail. If your Web mail supports POP, IMAP, or Exchange, then you can access it with Mail and filter it with SpamSieve. In your case, I think it would make sense to use an IMAP account. You can leave SpamSieve running on your Mac, so that the spam messages are moved to the Spam mailbox on the server and the rest of the messages stay in the inbox on the server. Then you’ll be able to access a spam-free inbox via your Treo or from an Internet cafe.

Statistics?
Hi have been using SpamSieve for a long time and have noticed from time to time that the first two categories in the statistics tab remain blank. Is there something I can do to get them to correctly render?

As far as I know, those would only be blank if the date at the bottom of the window were set to some time in the future or if the file that SpamSieve uses to record the statistics:

/Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/SpamSieve/History.db

were damaged. After quitting SpamSieve, you could delete the file in order to start a fresh database, or send it to me to try to repair it.

history.db
it turns out to be a huge file – 16 megs. I took it out of the folder… not sure if its worth sending?

Up to you. It should compress down to about 7 MB, but on the other hand there’s probably no particular reason that you need the old statistics.