SpamSieve overview

SpamSieve is a robust spam filter for major email clients that uses powerful Bayesian spam filtering.

SpamSieve understands what your spam looks like in order to block it all, but also learns what your legitimate messages look like to avoid confusion. SpamSieve only marks spam in your email client so you never lose any mail.

The following is a partial list of SpamSieve’s features, so that you can quickly see what it can do and how it’s unique:

Powerful Bayesian spam filtering results in high accuracy and almost no false positives. It adapts to the mail that you receive to get even better with time. Some other e-mail programs include Bayesian filters, but SpamSieve is more accurate.
Integrates with your e-mail program for a superior user experience. Plus, you get the same great filtering if you ever switch e-mail programs or use more than one at a time.
SpamSieve works with any mail provider/host. It filters all your mail accounts. There is no extra charge for additional addresses or devices.
SpamSieve running on your Mac can keep the spam off your iPhone/iPad, and you can even train SpamSieve from afar.
Colors show how spammy each message is, so you can quickly focus on the borderline ones if you want to check SpamSieve’s work.
Integrates with the macOS Contacts app (and also Eudora’s and Entourage’s address books) so that messages from friends and colleagues are never marked as spam.
Automatically maintains a blocklist so that it can instantly adapt to spam messages sent from particular addresses, and catch 100% of them.
Automatically maintains a whitelist to guarantee that messages from particular senders or mailing lists are never marked as spam, without cluttering your address book with these addresses.
You can customize the whitelist and blocklist, adding sophisticated rules that match various message headers, or the message body. The rules can match text in a variety of ways, including using regular expressions.
Can use the Habeas Safelist, which indicates messages that are not spam, as well as the "ADV" subject tag indicating that a message is spam.
Many spammers encode the contents of their messages so that filters cannot see the incriminating words they contain. SpamSieve can decode and look inside these messages. Optionally it can mark them all as spam, on the theory that legitimate senders do not try to obscure their messages.
SpamSieve keeps track of how accurate it is, how many good and spam messages you receive, and how these numbers change over time.
Turn off new-mail notification in your e-mail program, and let SpamSieve notify you only when you receive non-spam messages.
The corpus window and log let you see how each spam message was caught.
Unlike server-based spam filtering services, your mail data stays on your own Mac, so your privacy is preserved.
SpamSieve supports AppleScript, so you can connect it to additional apps and fully integrate it into a custom workflow.

What’s new in version 3.1

Highlights

Settings: FiltersMade various changes to improve SpamSieve’s filtering accuracy.
Previously, the Train as Good and Train as Spam commands in SpamSieve’s Message menu were disabled while you were in the app when there was nothing for them to apply to, i.e. if no messages were selected in the Corpus or Log. To reduce confusion, since some people thought these commands were meant to be used from within Apple Mail or Outlook, they are now always enabled but will open the Train as Good/Spam section of the help when not applicable, as that will direct you to the various ways that you can train SpamSieve from within your mail client.
Apple Mail: Training CommandsIf macOS incorrectly reports that SpamSieve is damaged when installing or updating the app, we now have a Download Fixer tool to help.
SpamSieve no longer triggers the “find devices on local networks” prompt on macOS 15. It never needed that access, anyway. If, for some reason, you still get the local network access prompt, it’s fine to click Don’t Allow.
SpamSieve is once again localized in Korean.

Blocklist and Allowlist

BlocklistIf SpamSieve hangs due to a bug in Swift Regex, it is now able to report the problematic pattern and string, so that you can temporarily disable the offending rule and so that we can make a bug report to Apple.
Editing Blocklist RuleAdded some protections to help prevent rules from malfunctioning if the rules database is damaged.

Log

Log WindowWhen you copy a log entry as text, it now shows more information about the corpus and rule changes.
If there’s an error reading an inessential part of the log database, SpamSieve will now just log the error instead of preventing you from using the app.

Apple Mail

Settings: Apple MailIf you’re using Proton Mail, we recommend using the Move it to the Trash if the spam score is at least setting to have SpamSieve move all spam messages to the Trash instead of to the Junk mailbox. This will ensure that Proton Mail removes the spam messages from the special All Mail mailbox.
Fixed a problem where, if you flagged a good message at the same time SpamSieve was filtering it, the flag could be overwritten.
Settings: Apple Mail FilteringWorked around a Mail bug where it could lose a message if you were manually refiltering messages that were already in the Junk mailbox.
Fixed an issue where, if a mail account was reset or Mail’s database was rebuilt, SpamSieve might reprocess old messages if they were still marked as unread.
Worked around a Mail bug that could cause a modal error to be reported (and block filtering and use of the app) when moving a message on an Exchange server.
Settings: Select Apple Mail Mailboxes to FilterThe Select Mailboxes to Filter… sheet now prevents the selection of additional sent and notes mailboxes, as these do not receive new messages that should be filtered.
Added some diagnostics to help track down a Mail bug that can cause messages to be inappropriately flagged orange when using the Mail extension.
The diagnostic report now includes additional information for troubleshooting problems with Mail’s database and Mail extensions.

Microsoft Outlook

Settings: Outlook SetupWhen there’s an error processing an Outlook message, SpamSieve now reports the account name and folder, not just the subject of the message.

General

Updated the Dutch, French, and German localizations.
StatisticsFixed an issue where SpamSieve could get confused if you corrected a mistake but the mail server had changed the message data in between the prediction and the training.
Tried to work around a macOS bug that could cause it to incorrectly report the SpamSieve application file as damaged.
The × button in progress views now has an accessibility label.
When trying to open a database file that’s damaged, SpamSieve will now move it aside (saving it for diagnostic and recovery purposes) and start a fresh database automatically, rather than blocking the app from launching.
Settings: StorageFixed a problem where database errors caused by the disk being full were not handled properly because macOS was incorrectly reporting the error.
Removed various code that is no longer used.
The diagnostic report now includes information about the app’s logs, the crash logs folder, and components that could cause AppleScript errors.
SpamSieve is now built with Xcode 16 and the macOS 15 SDK.

Documentation

Worked around a bug in macOS 15 where sometimes the system help viewer wouldn’t open to the right help page. SpamSieve will instead open help files in the user’s Web browser.
Improved several sections of the manual.

AppleScript

Corpus: WordsOptimized the scripting support so that it is now possible to access the entire contents of a large corpus without overwhelming AppleScript, as demonstrated here.
The training script commands now report an error if you forget to supply the message data.

View older SpamSieve versions

4.6

(186 Reviews of SpamSieve)

Comments
User Ratings

Pogmoor

Oct 20 2023

3.0.1

0.0

Version: 3.0.1

Thanks for version 3.01. Version 3.0 failed to filter a lot of spam from an old email address. Version 3.01 fixed it straight away. Brilliant!

dsotm52

Oct 7 2023

3.0

5.0

Version: 3.0

This app has tremendous value especially when we get inundated with spam. To date it has trapped all mail not based on my whitelist. It easily lets you identify what it might have considered spam by telling the system that particular mail was "Good". And the most important thing was when I had a learning issue, the support was fast and phenomenal. The developer was johnny on the spot helping me learn what I did to cause the issue. I highly recommend this app for those of you sick of being spammed and phished.

ERNEST UNGUREANU

Sep 25 2023

Whenever I open Apple Mail, 2 (two) SpamSieve dialogue boxes appear, which terrorized me ! Obviously, I'll kindly put Spamsieve in the trash...

Aargl

Sep 24 2023

If you have old email addresses that are literally bombed with spam, SpamSieve is a godsend. But the trouble with spam is that it will never end and that you can't avoid checking false positives or negatives. I've tried to stick for years to the typical jefferson.smith@senat.com (sample ;)) but in the end I reluctantly had to change my address. Spammers mostly use the same old databases, so if your address was created more than ten years ago, you're very lucky if it's not in those databases (same for your old password if you never changed it). Sometimes it's better to cut a leg than to try and cure it...

Mar 12 2023

2.9.52

Version: 2.9.52

For me, it didn't work. I even copied into the Blacklist of the application about 90 addresses that send me SPAM. Well, it's stayed just the same as before. I complied point by point with the fairly complicated instructions, and... nothing.