Ovidiu Predescu's Weblog

Jaguar's Mail.app not very effective fighting spam

It looks like the Mail application that ships with MacOS X 10.2 Jaguar is not very effective in identifying my junk mail. After more than 2 weeks in training mode, I still get lots of junk. Today for example, after a normal week-end, when I came back to office I had 160+ messages, out of which only 3 were legitimate. As you notice in the attached picture, Mail was unable to mark most of them as junk.

Microsoft Entourage had similar problems in identifying junk mail, so I'm happy with neither of them.

The only successful spam killer I've found is SpamAssasin, a collection of Perl scripts to be used in conjunction with procmail. I used to run this tool very successfully on my Linux desktop, until I moved to MacOS X. In MacOS 10.1 it was impossible to run procmail with Mail.app, because of the mailbox format used by Mail.

A more MacOS-X-ish solution would be to have the ability to have Mail.app run an AppleScript when email is received. Mail.app doesn't have this ability however. Interestingly enough, Microsoft Entourage has it. In many respects, Entourage feels a more mature application than Mail.app.