Where to put spamsieve filter in Mail?

I have quite a few rules set up in Mail to filter email from clients. Sometimes I get mail from clients that aren’t in my address book (billsmith@acmeintl.com). As a result, I’ve always put the Spamsieve filter at the end of my rules. A few stray spam get in, but that’s I’m willing to do that so that I can be sure of getting all important emails.

The documentation says to put Spamsieve first. I’m planning to add a rule to transfer email to another account for access from my palm when I’m travelling. I’d need to move the spamsieve filter up top in order to make that happen.

Can I be certain that I’ll still get the emails I need? I get a ton of spam and filtering through the spam messages is tedious…

thanks,
Chris

You cannot be certain of anything, either with your home-made rules or with SpamSieve, but I think it’s safer to use SpamSieve.

I recommend putting SpamSieve first so that it can see all the messages (both spam and good) that you receive. This way it can learn to recognize your good mail. If you wish, you can create SpamSieve whitelist rules to help it. The advantage to using whitelist rules instead of rules in Mail is that if you get a message from a client that doesn’t match one of the whitelist rules, SpamSieve’s Bayesian classifier will probably still classify it as good. If you just used rules in Mail, and your rules missed a message, SpamSieve be would in the dark because you’d been hiding those messages from it all along. In other words, you can use (whitelist) rules to make sure that certain messages always get through, but let SpamSieve help you out with the ones (both spam and good) that don’t match those rules.