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 3.1.1

Highlights

Made various changes to improve SpamSieve’s filtering accuracy.
When a supported mail client is the frontmost app, the first item of the SpamSieve icon menu, instead of being a static label, now opens the setup instructions for that mail client.
The training commands in the Message menu in the SpamSieve icon menu now work when SpamSieve is not the frontmost app. The original thinking was to disable these, because people would use the hotkeys or the more convenient top-level menu commands for this purpose, but it turns out that many people prefer to use the Message submenu.
Working with large selections in the Corpus, Allowlist, Blocklist, and Log windows is much faster and uses less memory. Now SpamSieve waits to load the selected items until you actually do something with them, and then it does so in batches to that they don’t all need to be stored in memory at the same time.

Apple Mail

The Filter Messages hotkey (Command-Control-L) was originally intended for use with the Mail extension, but it is now also available when using the Mail plug-in setup.
Fixed a bug where, if you went on vacation and didn’t launch Mail for a week, when you got back to lots of new messages SpamSieve might not filter some of them because it would see them as old.
Worked around a Mail bug where a message might disappear when trained as good instead of moving to the inbox. (If messages ever disappear, you can recover them from the Log window.)
When training a message as good and moving it to the inbox, if multiple mail accounts have the same e-mail address that matches the message, SpamSieve now prefers the inbox of the account that the message is already in.
SpamSieve now reports an error if multiple Mail accounts have the same name, as that can prevent filtering from working.
If SpamSieve can’t find an account’s Junk mailbox when training a message as spam, it now reports an error that shows the name of the problematic account.

General

You can now close the Settings window by pressing the Esc key.
When you click an esoteric preferences link to enable or disable debug logging, the change now takes effect immediately, without having to restart SpamSieve.
Worked around several macOS bugs that could cause crashes when trying to access the Contacts database.
Diagnostic report files are much smaller, as they no longer include excerpts from the verbose system console log, only from SpamSieve’s own log files.
Fixed a rare crash that could occur when updating the log after training a message.
Fixed a rare crash that could occur when reporting an error about a database that couldn’t be saved.
Fixed a rare crash that could occur because the Bayesian classifier’s internal state was invalid.

Documentation

SpamSieve 3.1 introduced a workaround of opening help pages in the user’s Web browser because the system help viewer doesn’t work properly on macOS 15.
- Fixed a bug where help pages could open in a text editor instead of in your browser if you’d changed the default opener for .html files.
- You can now hold down the Option key when clicking a help link to switch between using a Web browser and using the help viewer, e.g. if you prefer the non-default behavior for your version of macOS or to test whether the help viewer is working properly.
Fixed the PowerMail help links in the Settings ‣ Other Clients window.
Improved the following sections of the manual:

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.