Spamfire
Eudora Tip #144/07-Aug-2002

Several Tips recently have looked at the problem of Spam and suggested various filters. Even so, I’ve been getting totally sick and tired of some really offensive Spam relating to sexual practices generally considered taboo in our society. Then I read in the most excellent TidBITS newsletter about a piece of software called Spamfire.

<http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-640.html>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbser=1221>

Then Spamfire was mentioned in the Blog of Dori Smith whose opinion I also respect.

<http://www.backupbrain.com/2002_07_21_archive.html#a002856>

So, with this in mind I investigated Spamfire and this week want to recommend you investigate it yourself as a useful adjunct to Eudora.

I have some 57 filters in Eudora just dealing with the 30 or 40 Spam messages I receive every day. Every time I make a new filter for something interesting I have to then go and move that filter up the list in several steps so as to put it before the spam filters. Moreover, the spammers keep changing tactics so I have to keep making new spam filters. Some of the recent Spam I’ve been getting is pretty horrid stuff too.

This is all very labour intensive and I spend time on this which could be spent on much more profitable or enjoyable tasks. It makes sense to outsource some of this work and hand it over to specialists. This is the job Spamfire does.

You start up Spamfire for the first time and use the wizard to enter details about your email account — name, password, the usual sort of thing. Then you tell Spamfire to check your mail (or not) at regular intervals and set it to get Eudora to check your mail after Spamfire has done its work. If you have Eudora set to automatically check your mail at regular intervals you should stop it from doing so.

Now Spamfire looks at your online email box and compares the messages against a very large set of criteria. It gives each message a score built up from the comparison against all the criteria and divides your messages into “good” messages and suspect messages. It then tells Eudora to collect those good messages and offers you a list of suspect messages. You can look at the list of suspects and collect any which actually are good messages while deleting any which are spam. This means that Eudora actually only downloads known good messages.

As you use Spamfire you also have many controls to finetune the filtering for yourself.

As I tried out the software I kept asking myself why I should pay money for something Eudora actually does reasonably well (ie collecting mail and applying filters). Then I realised that the creators of Spamfire are taking the hard, tedious drudgery out of Spam. They maintain a comprehensive set of filters. They update the filters. They add new criteria all the time.

It also means that I can delete all my Spam filters from Eudora and focus on handling real email while having full control over what is defined as Spam and how it’s handled. Spamfire can do its job of dealing with Spam, Eudora can get on with its job of handling email and I can get on with my job.

There’s a free demo available, a Lite version (US$20) and a Pro version (US$30).

<http://www.matterform.com/spamfire/>