Take Control of Apple Mail : Solve Problems, Work Smart, and End Spam

Rating:
Summary: Extensive discussion of spam filters
Review: Email was the first killer application of the Internet, predating the Web and its browsers by over a decade. And here, for those of you on Macs, is Apple's latest front end to email usage. Kissell goes into how to use the client side GUI. As you might expect, Apple offers a clear and attractive design. Made as intuitive as possible.

Of course, there is a little bit more to email than just the client side. You have to get your messages from a message server. An unavoidable complication. So Kissell delves into POP and IMAP servers, without drowning you in technical details. He gives very straightforward explanations, directed at a lay audience.

As a sign of our times, he offers an extensive discussion of spam filters for the Mac. By now, there are several available. None of these are very effective. Filtering messages on keywords that are bad words may detect some porn messages, but the nonporn spam is much harder to tackle by this method. Plus, there are many ways for a spammer to insert deliberate misspellings, to avoid these tests.

The Bayesian methods are probabilistic and require training on known sets of spam and nonspam. Plus, such Bayesians can be poisoned by spammers sending messages with all sorts of irrelevant words. You will need to periodically retrain it.

You will just have to tolerate the spam any of these methods let through, until better techniques come along.