Re: SpamSieve or spam download problem
SpamSieve and PowerMail have been working beautifully for me, since around 2005 I think? Starting in mid-April I started getting apparent spam messages with No Sender Name and No Subject, also no text that I can see, several of these every day. PM/SS stall while downloading email that has even one of these on the server. When I delete the blank messages manually from the ISP website, though, then the rest of the email downloads via PM/SS just fine. Do you think I should try re-setting the corpus? I am a little scared to do this as I've never tinkered much with SS. I did clear the History which was fine but didn't solve the problem. Hi Anna, I don't think this is related to SpamSieve because it doesn't have any interaction with the mail server. It doesn't do anything until PowerMail has completed the download and sent it a message to analyze. You can tell for sure by turning off spam filtering in PowerMail and seeing if that helps. Another thing you could do is take a sample of PowerMail: http://c-command.com/spamsieve/help/sending-in-a-sample-r during the stall to record what it is doing. And CTM might be able to suggest a more PowerMail-specific way to log its communication with the mail server. --Michael -- Michael Tsai C-Command Software
Re: No SpamSieve
On Mar 5, 2010, at 7:49 PM, Tom Dillon wrote: It's gotten to where I have to replace the corrupted SpamSieve - Evaluate.scpt file once or more times a week. It's not that big of a problem, but I'm wondering how or why it's getting corrupted? Is PM writing to the AppleScript file? I think the OS may be writing to it because the top-level variables are implicitly script properties. I've seen this cause problems with Entourage. Try wrapping the whole thing in a handler: on rateCurrentMessages() tell application PowerMail set msgList to current messages repeat with msg in msgList try set src to source of msg tell application SpamSieve to set externalSpamLevel to (score message src) if externalSpamLevel 0 then set spam rating of msg to externalSpamLevel end if end try end repeat end tell end rateCurrentMessages my rateCurrentMessages() and see if that helps. --Michael -- Michael Tsai C-Command Software
Re: PM 6 doesn't activate SpamSieve anymore!
On Jan 2, 2009, at 2:48 PM, listes wrote: I don't know what I did, but PM6 just doesn't run SpamSieve anymore when I set it to do so via the 'antispam assistant'. When new mail comes, SpamSieve is just not launched, and when I select an obvious spam in the incoming folder and run the spam: evaluate' script, its spam level stays at zero. Please see this page: http://c-command.com/spamsieve/manual-ah/checking-the-powermail -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: SpamSieve stopped working
On Dec 5, 2008, at 11:18 AM, Chuck Joiner wrote: I know this comes up every so often, but darned if I remember the solution. For no apparent reason, SpamSieve stopped working in PowerMail. Have deleted the corpus, re-trained, and even deleted and re-installed the app. All of that was probably unnecessary. Please see this page: http://c-command.com/spamsieve/manual-ah/why-is-spamsieve-not-ca In this case, my guess is that you need to delete the folder: /Users/username/Library/Application Support/PowerMail -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: SpamSieve Statistics
On Oct 15, 2008, at 7:51 AM, Jeremy Hughes wrote: Is the Statistics window in SpamSieve 2.7.1 broken? No. Only you can know whether the statistics shown match reality, but most likely they do. What it says is that SpamSieve has not been asked to filter any messages since yesterday at noon. This could be because you didn't receive any messages or because of a setup problem in PowerMail. Less likely, it's possible that a damaged database file is causing SpamSieve to show fewer messages than there actually were--you could tell if this were the case because the statistics would be inconsistent with the log. Secondly, it says that you've only trained SpamSieve with 13 messages (total, not just since yesterday). Or maybe you recently reset the corpus? -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: SpamSieve Statistics
On Oct 15, 2008, at 11:08 AM, Jeremy Hughes wrote: I reset the corpus earlier today, because it had got large and I thought this might be causing the Statistics problem. There is no relation between corpus size and the statistics. I wonder if the problem is caused by the fact that SpamSieve's History.db file has got quite large (122.9 MB). The size doesn't matter, but it sounds like the file is damaged. You could either start a new one (hold Command-Option when launching SpamSieve) or send me the file (e.g. on an iDisk or Dropbox) and I'll repair it. -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: SpamSieve Statistics
On Oct 15, 2008, at 8:46 AM, Jeremy Hughes wrote: But as you can see from my last email, SpamSieve is filtering mail (2 Good Messages, 11 Spam Messages) but failing to report this in the Filtered Mail and SpamSieve Accuracy sections. The 2 and 11 are the numbers of messages in the corpus (i.e. the ones you've trained it with). They don't show that it filtered any messages. You'd need to look at the log to determine whether it did. -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: SpamSieve Statistics
On Oct 15, 2008, at 12:10 PM, Jeremy Hughes wrote: The 2 and 11 are the numbers of messages in the corpus (i.e. the ones you've trained it with). I didn't train it with any messages - these are messages that SpamSieve has filtered (the current totals are 50 good and 112 spam). You did, in a fashion, if you had auto-training turned on: http://c-command.com/spamsieve/manual-ah/auto-train-with-incomin When the corpus is very small, SpamSieve will auto-train with virtually all the filtered messages. So the corpus will built up automatically and you only have to manually train it if there's a mistake. -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: SpamSieve slowness
On Sep 8, 2008, at 1:25 PM, Jeremy Hughes wrote: SpamSieve seems to have become really slow for me recently, and I suspect it is because my spam corpus is pretty large (345,672 messages, 2,390,729 words). Does this seem unreasonably large? Yes, it's normal to have under 2,000 messages and 200,000 words in the corpus. There used to be a Prune Corpus option, but this has disappeared - should I just open the corpus and delete everything that was Last Used before 2008? That would certainly make it faster. It would probably be better for the accuracy, however, if you reset the corpus and then re-trained SpamSieve with a smaller number of recent messages: http://c-command.com/spamsieve/manual-ah/using-spamsieve-with-yo SpamSieve's auto-training feature has been improved since you started using it, so the corpus will no longer grow so large by itself. I first noticed the slowness after moving from Tiger to Leopard a few weeks back - not sure if this is connected. Yes, it runs faster on Tiger. Apple made some of the APIs much slower in Leopard. -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: SpamSieve slowness
On Sep 8, 2008, at 10:23 PM, Michael Lewis wrote: Yes, it runs faster on Tiger. Apple made some of the APIs much slower in Leopard. Sorry for drifintg off topic a bit, but this makes me want to ask something... I haven't used the newer Leopard yet. This makes me want to ask if the slowness is noticeable on newer Macs or not? I didn't install it on my current G4 systems because I suspected it would bog down, but I figured that'd be more due to the eye candy than the internal stuff. The part that's much slower is a very specific area that SpamSieve happens to stress a lot, but which most applications don't. When running on Leopard, SpamSieve uses my own code instead, which is much faster than Leopard's but not as fast as Tiger's. With a normal-sized SpamSieve corpus, the difference is barely noticeable. Overall, I'd say that Leopard is only slightly slower than Tiger on a G4. If you have a GB of RAM, I'd definitely run Leopard. -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: spam Sieve and Powermail
Jul 31, 2008, at 10:57 PM, Christian Meenaghan wrote: For some reason, spamsieve no longer launches with Powermail since the 5.6.5 update. Please note that SpamSieve is not supposed to launch when you launch PowerMail. It only auto-launches when PowerMail downloads new messages that need to be filtered. That said, there may be a problem with your PowerMail setup. Please see the troubleshooting steps here: http://c-command.com/spamsieve/manual-ah/why-is-spamsieve-not-ca -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: Lost Spam Sieve
On May 28, 2008, at 2:39 PM, Ira Lansing wrote: Spam Sieve is once again working as it should, but I am finding that with this latest version of PM, Spam Sieve initially launches slowly, slow enough to result in the spinning multi-colored beach ball. I'm aware of some performance problems launching SpamSieve 2.7 on Mac OS X 10.5 if the corpus is large. If this sounds like your situation, please e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]. -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: Email Freezes PowerMail
On Feb 1, 2008, at 4:18 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The oddest thing is that I have Spamsieve miunging the emails on the host end! I get a SPAM**... added int he subject line, and the email is a spamsieve message telling about it with a bit of the first part of the mail but a link to read the full spam. You must be thinking of a different filter, since SpamSieve doesn't run on the server and doesn't modify or generate e-mails. -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: Spamsieve stopped working
On Nov 7, 2007, at 2:40 AM, Jonathan Brady wrote: Powermail stopped sending any messages to spamsieve. Nothing out of the ordinary happened. So no idea what could have caused this sudden loss of functionality. I tried rebooting the system, reconfiguring spamsieve, going through the spam filter assistant, and nothing helped. Did you try deleting the folder: /Users/username/Library/Application Support/PowerMail so that PowerMail will use fresh spam AppleScripts? -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: My Leopard issues...
On Nov 2, 2007, at 8:01 AM, Fabian Ramirez wrote: SpamSieve is having issues as well (SLOW loading, non-responsive) Please see the bottom of this page: http://c-command.com/blog/2007/10/25/leopard-compatibility/ -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: PowerMail and Leopard
On Oct 27, 2007, at 11:28 AM, Geoff Roynon wrote: Using PowerMail 5.5.3 (SpamSieve 2.4.4) on a G5 dual 1.8MHz, 3 GB RAM, under MacOSX 10.5 Please update to SpamSieve 2.6.4, especially if you're running Leopard. -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: PM Looking for Adobe Illustrator
On Jun 18, 2007, at 1:51 PM, Anthony Sanna wrote: Question, shouldn't SS open with PM? I thought that after the first time you manually opened SS with PM that it would automatically do it from then on. This new install doesn't, it seems. SpamSieve should open when there are new messages to filter. I suppose it's possible that the AppleScript is damaged so that it's trying to tell Illustrator to filter spam instead of SpamSieve. If that's the case, installing a fresh copy of the PowerMail application and deleting the folder: /Users/username/Library/Application Support/PowerMail should help. -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: PowerMail vs. Thunderbird
On Apr 19, 2007, at 11:59 AM, Barbara Needham wrote: Spam: SpamSieve works seamlessly with PowerMail. As far as I can see, it does not work with Thunderbird. SpamSieve 2.6 does work with Thunderbird. However, the accuracy of the spam filtering will be a bit higher if you use it with PowerMail. -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: Thank you Michael Tsai and SpamSieve
On Mar 17, 2007, at 12:51 PM, A-NO-NE Music wrote: Thanks for your quick response as always. To answer your question, yes, when I am in doubt one of my servers is down, I send a test message to that account from another account to see when the server comes back. OK. That doesn't sound like the kind of message that you would need to be classified as good on the basis of the address book alone. If you exclude your address from the address book, SpamSieve can classify the messages based on their contents, and if it accidentally marks one as spam it wouldn't be a problem because you were expecting the message (you sent it yourself). Enable this option so that spam messages with your own return address are not marked as good. Which is a bit confusing. Exclude my address from what? Normally, if you have Use Mac OS X Address Book checked, messages whose addresses are in the address book will always be marked as good, no matter how spammy their contents may look. If you exclude your address from the address book, SpamSieve pretends that it is not in the address book, and so it will classify messages from your address using other means. In your help page above: The easiest way to add your addresses to the Me card is to open your mail program and then use SpamSieve's Update Address Book Me Card command. I just did that, and I see all 26 addresses are added to Apple Address Book, not PM's. I don't see any 'Me' card in PM's address book. The reason that you need a Me card is so that SpamSieve knows which addresses are yours. If you choose Go to My card from the Card menu, it will show you your Me card. If there is none, you can create one using the Make This My Card command. -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: greeting card malware?
On Jan 29, 2007, at 7:39 PM, Frank Mitchell wrote: But then why do spammers send messages full of random words? It seems pointless to me. The random words do help, to varying extents, against different types of filters. And there's very little downside to including them. On Jan 29, 2007, at 11:38 PM, Michael Lewis wrote: I probably didn't communicate that well. As an example, this was in my log: Predicted: Good (27) Trained: Good (Auto) So, it was predicting this as good, and training it as good (auto). I think that's the Learning function under Training preferences kicking in? Yes, this is normal. The auto-training feature thought that this was an interesting message because it was borderline (score of 27, with 50 being spam), so it decided to learn from it. Then I'd click Mark as Spam and this would show up in the log: Trained: Spam (Manual) Mistake: False Negative But this time it was wrong, so with your help it corrected the training and recognized that it had made a mistake. -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: greeting card malware?
On Jan 29, 2007, at 10:38 AM, Michael Lewis wrote: SpamSieve isn't even catching a lot of it, particularly the ones that are filled with random sentences from works of literature. I'm not aware of any spam types that consistently get through SpamSieve, when it's properly configured and trained. If certain kinds of messages keep ending up in your inbox, please report them: http://c-command.com/spamsieve/manual-ah/what-information-should so that I can see if in fact they got through SpamSieve, and what can be done about it. On Jan 29, 2007, at 1:36 PM, Frank Mitchell wrote: For this reason, I simply delete such random word messages rather than do a Mark as Spam. I don't recommend doing that. Not correcting SpamSieve's mistakes is a sure way to make more spam get through, and in certain cases is equivalent to telling SpamSieve that you think the deleted messages are good: http://c-command.com/blog/2006/11/11/tell-spamsieve-the-truth/ -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: greeting card malware?
On Jan 29, 2007, at 4:26 PM, Michael Lewis wrote: My filter was set to only operate if the From,Sender or Reply To: address was not in my addressbook. I noticed that some of the spam not making it through was being marked Good automatically in the log for various reasons or possibly not being evaluated Yes, using those criteria could cause some messages not to be evaluated (in which case there would be no Predicted entries in the log for them). I'm not sure what you mean about messages being marked as good automatically. However, every time I drag the spam to reapply the rule from the Filter menu, the log shows that I am manually choosing to make it NOT spam again. There is a setting in PowerMail to manually mark as good any mail dragged out of the Spam folder, so that could be a bit confusing. Thanks for mentioning that. I'll clarify it in the next revision of the documentation. On Jan 29, 2007, at 5:16 PM, Geoff Roynon wrote: I filter GIF and JPG spam before it reaches the Spamsieve filter so they don't pollute the Spamsieve corpus. In my filters, my first filter is called Spam-gif and has two conditions: From is not in address book Attachment ends with .gif I don't think one needs to worry about polluting the corpus, and SpamSieve should be able to catch these image spams. If this kind of manual filter works well for you, that's great, but I don't recommend it in general because there are legitimate reasons for non-spammers who aren't in the address book to be sending GIFs. -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: [ANN] PowerMail 5.5.1 universal released
On Nov 10, 2006, at 4:21 PM, K Lewis wrote: It's performing very well for me, however, I just got a warning that SpamSieve is a demo version. Do I have to buy it again? No, just enter your name and serial number into the Purchase window. -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: SS with Mail
On Oct 16, 2006, at 10:37 AM, Anthony Sanna wrote: I'm trying to setup SpamSieve with Mail. How do you get SS to auto launch like it does with PM, and do you get the good/bad icons in the tool bar? It will launch automatically when there are messages to process. SpamSieve adds training commands to Mail's Message menu; it does not add toolbar buttons. If you have further questions, you can write me off-list, as this doesn't pertain to PowerMail. -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: Re(2): How I have my spam filters set up
On Oct 3, 2006, at 1:59 PM, Brian Jacobs wrote: Do you or anyone else here know if SpamSieve can be programmed to filter out unwanted emails with Japanese text Subject and Content. It will probably learn to do this automatically if you keep marking the Japanese messages as spam. You could also try creating a blocklist rule that uses Any Character Set and match against whatever charsets you're receiving. -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: Re(3): How I have my spam filters set up
On Sep 30, 2006, at 2:51 PM, Art Wheat wrote: I have had excellent results with SpamSeive until recently at work (home version is still working just fine). Mail is coming in addressed to me directly. It says it is from someone I know but a quick look at the headers and it shows it is really addressed to one of my accounts. What does the Predicted entry in SpamSieve's log say for this message? I turned off the option to Exclude my addresses (looks like that is a Mac OS X Address Book feature which I don't use--PowerMail has all my addresses so I don't think that will matter. That option could matter if you have PowerMail set to sync with the OS X address book. -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: SPAM Question
On Aug 17, 2006, at 1:48 PM, A-NO-NE Music wrote: which confirms this. What you should do is make sure that Exclude my addresses is checked in SpamSieve's preferences: I can't. I send out gig notification often. Sometime I send mail to myself when ISP is in question. I need this enabled. I believe it makes more sense if actual name is looked up, especially anyone can get your email address easily these days Well, if you want any hope of catching spam messages sent using your address, you (currently) must use Exclude my addresses. If you want to always accept messages sent using your name, you could create a whitelist rule: From (name) Is Equal To A-NO-NE Or you could edit the Spam: evaluate filter in PowerMail so that it only applies SpamSieve if the name is not A-NO-NE *and* the address is not [EMAIL PROTECTED]. I don't think there's a way to set this up in the UI, but it could probably be done with an AppleScript filter condition. -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: SPAM Question
On Aug 17, 2006, at 12:30 PM, A-NO-NE Music wrote: Actually, you are right that is the exact cause, except that it is looking at the address only. As you told me via private e-mail, the SpamSieve log said: Reason: sender [EMAIL PROTECTED] in address book which confirms this. What you should do is make sure that Exclude my addresses is checked in SpamSieve's preferences: http://c-command.com/spamsieve/manual-ah/exclude-my-addresses and that the above address is on the Me card in the system Address Book. If it checks the name field, they shouldn't match. SpamSieve doesn't match the sender name against the name in the address book. The idea of using the address book in the first place is as a safety feature. SpamSieve would probably classify messages from your regular correspondents correctly, anyway, but if you tell it to use the address book you can be sure that those messages will never be classified as spam. It's extra piece of mind, at the possible cost of a few spam messages with forged addresses getting through. Since there are plenty of legitimate reasons why the sender name might not exactly match the one in the address book, SpamSieve cannot look at the name without compromising the safety--so the address book filter just looks at the address. -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: SPAM Question
On Aug 16, 2006, at 5:43 PM, A-NO-NE Music wrote: I get tons of SPAM which sender is my address but the sender _name_ is someone else, and the TO is also identical to FROM. The first thing to check is SpamSieve's log: http://c-command.com/spamsieve/manual-ah/open-log to see if the messages are being classified as good because of the sender address, or because of the content. -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: Universal Binary
On Aug 16, 2006, at 5:28 PM, Eric Bickford wrote: I can confirm that each time my PowerMail crashes, SpamSieve also dies/ quits/disappears. And there is NO SpamSieve.crash.log or SpamSieve crash reporter. I only get a crash report for PowerMail. If crash reporting is on (which it sounds like it is) and you don't get a crash report for SpamSieve, then SpamSieve didn't crash. If SpamSieve is not involved, is there any other explanation for why SpamSieve would just quit whenever PowerMail crashes? Yes, SpamSieve has a feature that makes it quit itself when it notices that your mail program is no longer running: http://c-command.com/spamsieve/manual-ah/quit-when-mail-client-q -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: Universal Binary
On Aug 15, 2006, at 8:01 PM, Sean McBride wrote: Have you ever considered adding support for Smart Crash Reports? SpamSieve already has its own crash reporter, which unlike SCR works back to 10.2 and doesn't modify Apple's crash reporter. -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: The SpamSieve - Evaluate.scpt gets corrupted
On Mar 11, 2006, at 6:53 AM, Jakob Riis wrote: But anyhow it would of course be better to know whether I could do something to prevent this from happening again, or if it's a bug that needs a fix!? Have you checked your drive with Disk Utility or DiskWarrior? --Michael
Re: Re(4): SpamSieve Auto (not) Start
On Jan 27, 2006, at 12:25 PM, Barbara Needham wrote: Just a note: I've not had any problem but am still on Panther. It seems it might be a Tiger problem. No one's written in with this (on Tiger or otherwise), so I don't think it's a generalized problem. On Jan 27, 2006, at 12:45 PM, Karel Gillissen wrote: Yep, if I manually mark a message, SpamSieve kicks in Does it work if you ask PowerMail to perform the SpamSieve evaluate filter (on a message that matches that filter's conditions)? If not, you may need to get a fresh copy of the evaluate script by installing a fresh copy of the PowerMail application. -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: Re(2): SpamSieve Auto (not) Start
On Jan 27, 2006, at 10:21 AM, Karel Gillissen wrote: And that's why the read-me recommends that you double-click SpamSieve after updating it. And if that fails, Michael, any advise? Does it start when you mark messages as spam/good? -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: SpamSieve Auto (not) Start
On Jan 27, 2006, at 9:16 AM, Ismaldo wrote: SpamSieve didn't kick in when PM launched, or when PM found Spam. The first time around, on two installs, my in-box was choked with SSS (same old spam). However, after I manually started the new SS, it did work as usual the next time that PM was launched. And that's why the read-me recommends that you double-click SpamSieve after updating it. -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: Spam Sieve Stopped working?
On Sep 9, 2005, at 2:38 PM, Anthony Sanna wrote: I also started getting an obnoxious, multi-addressee e-mail from from someone who sends out 4 or 5 lengthy, windy, opinionated posts a day. ...get a life! This isn't a spammer, but comes from a fixed address. I seem to have finally stopped it - or he ran out of opinions - but I clicked on the spam button for days before it stopped appearing. Any reason why it should have been so difficult to lose this guy? It depends. Was the address added to your blocklist when you marked the message as spam? (You can check by looking at the first relevant Trained: Spam entry in SpamSieve's log.) If so, it should have immediately started blocking the messages. If not, then it might take a while to learn those kind of messages, since they differ so much from regular spam. What do the Predicted: Good entries (if any) from SpamSieve's log say about the messages? -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: How to get False Positives into spamsieve?
On May 28, 2005, at 1:31 AM, A-NO-NE Music wrote: Just tonight, once again, from a sender who is not on my address book but has exchanged emails many times a few month ago was sent to SPAM folder, [...] Here is the log, and I don't know what to make of this: = Mistake: \u8aa4\u691c\u51fa Subject: Hiro-san!! Identifier: 1JduKypu9a/16+li5JzqEw== Classifier: Bayesian Score: 73 Date: 2005-05-28 01:18:58 -0400 == This means that the message did not match the address book, whitelist, blocklist, etc. SpamSieve's Bayesian classifier examined the contents of the message and found that it was barely spam (73 is about the lowest score a spam message will get). The corresponding Predicted entry in the log will have more details about what aspects of the message caused this classification. Since you say you've been having general accuracy problems recently, I'd like to take a closer look and see what's going on. Please send these files: /Users/username/Library/Logs/SpamSieve/SpamSieve Log /Users/username/Library/Preferences/com.c-command.SpamSieve.plist to [EMAIL PROTECTED]. -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: Spamsieve Changing Behaviour (?)
On May 17, 2005, at 10:22 AM, A-NO-NE Music wrote: in the last four weeks SS has been changing spam ratings to messages coming from historical senders which have never been identified as spammers and now, they suddenly are. I am glad I am not alone! I reported this a month ago, which seems to coincide with yours. Mine started roughly around OSX10.3.9 release time, tho. I don't think I have any messages from you on that subject. I try to follow the list, but sometimes miss messages. If you want to be guaranteed a response, please write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]. Many spam those which should had been caught are now missed, while a few legit ones are marked SPAM and sent to Spam folders almost every day. The best thing to do in a situation like this is to look at SpamSieve's log (or ask me to do so). It will tell you which messages it predicted to be spam or good, and why. And it will tell you which messages it was trained with and whether it recognized them as false negatives or positives. In most cases where there are a lot of misclassifications, the log--which represents SpamSieve's view of the world--doesn't agree with what you've observed in the mail program. This indicates a configuration problem (e.g. with the filters in the mail program) rather than an accuracy problem and is generally straightforward to correct. On May 17, 2005, at 10:51 AM, Michael Lewis wrote: Maybe this isn't the list to ask. SpamSieve seems its the culprit here and it may be better to check the SpamSieve site or list. Here is information about subscribing to the SpamSieve Talk list: http:// lists.c-command.com/listinfo.cgi/spamsieve-talk-c-command.com. I try to keep tech support off the mailing list. It'll be interesting to see how this holds up as I run it more and the corpus and rules grow. Maybe it would be a good thing to rebuild the corpus and rules once a year? It's not necessary or particularly helpful to clean out the rules, though you can if you want. Rebuilding the corpus every year or so (depending on how many messages you receive) *is* useful, though. If you've got training tips enabled in SpamSieve, it will tell you when to consider doing that. -- Michael Tsai http://c-command.com
Re: SpamSieve whitelist/PM whitelist
On Dec 16, 2004, at 11:35 AM, Jeremy Hughes wrote: I'm currently using 2.2.3, and I had this problem quite recently. Looking at the white list, there is an entry for Eric (which I remember disabling) dated 15th November 2004. Maybe this was created by an earlier version of SpamSieve. Probably. Please let me know if you see any new rules like that being created. -- Michael Tsai http://www.c-command.com
Re: SpamSieve whitelist/PM whitelist
On Dec 16, 2004, at 5:58 AM, Jeremy Hughes wrote: 2. SpamSieve has a white list which contains the names and email addresses of messages which have been marked as good. I have had a few problems with this - specifically, where a good email is sent from (say) Steve [EMAIL PROTECTED]. In this case SpamSieve will whitelist [EMAIL PROTECTED] (which is good) and will also whitelist Steve, which is problemmatic. A few days later, I might get an email from Steve [EMAIL PROTECTED], and SpamSieve will pass this through as a non- spam email because it has whitelisted Steve. I can resolve the problem by deleting or disabling Steve from the white list, but I think that there should be a preference option to control the way in which names are automatically whitelisted. It would be better if only names that are reasonably distinct get whitelisted - e.g. first/second name combinations (Steve Smith). For exactly this reason, SpamSieve 2.2.2 and later do not automatically whitelist simple names. -- Michael Tsai http://www.c-command.com
Re: SPAMSieve
On Oct 10, 2004, at 8:59 AM, A-NO-NE Music wrote: Today, I found my amazon order confirmation sent to my legit address in SPAM box with c.a. 75% SPAM rating. I am very curious how SPAMSieve thinks, 'coz similar order confirmation to the same address from other vendors doesn't get caught with this much high SPAM rating. SpamSieve's log will say why it made that prediction for this message. Order confirmations often have spammy characteristics, so it's best to train SpamSieve with any saved ones that you have ahead of time, so that it will learn to identify them. -- Michael Tsai http://www.c-command.com
Re: f i l t e r s p a c e d s p a m t e x t ?
On Oct 9, 2004, at 4:10 AM, listes wrote: It seems the latest way for spams to escape SpamSieve is to create stupid ads where words cannot be distinguished by our filters, b e c a u s e t h e r e a r e s p a c e s i n s e r t e d b e t w e e n t h e l e t t e r s ... SpamSieve has code to undo that kind of spacing trick, i.e. to put the words back together. So ordinarily, this shouldn't be a problem. If there are particular messages that are giving you trouble, please send exports of them to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and I will examine them. How can I create a filter rule, or a RegExp in SpamSieve, that would oust out anything containing a series of single letters separated by single spaces? I don't recommend doing that, because there are actually quite a number of legitimate messages that space-out words, or have sequences of letters that *look* like spaced-out words. -- Michael Tsai http://www.c-command.com
Re: SpamSieve question
On Sep 7, 2004, at 9:41 AM, Jim Pistrang wrote: 1) you should tell SpamSieve to only evaluate if the 'from' address is NOT in your address book. Or, better yet, set PowerMail to synchronize with Apple's address book. Then SpamSieve will see the messages. It won't mark them as spam because the From is in the address book, and it will also be able to learn from the message contents. -- Michael Tsai http://www.c-command.com
Re: Email Alerts
On Aug 18, 2004, at 11:01 AM, Christian Meenaghan wrote: Recently, I seem to be having a problem, where SPamSieve does not notify me on emails from people that I regularly receive email from. Perhaps you have PowerMail set to not Evalute spam rating on messages from people in your address book (or previous recipients). In that case, SpamSieve will never see the messages, and so it will not be able to notify you about them. A workaround would be to set the condition to Always. -- Michael Tsai http://www.c-command.com
Re: SpamSieve - redirect
On Jul 5, 2004, at 5:28 AM, david.gordon wrote:
I have a spam filter on my server which deals with 99% of all known
germs. SpamSieve catches the last 1%. I usually redirect any spam back
to
the mail server where its added to the filters.
I want to automatically redirect any spam. I added a line to my
SpamSieve
rule but I ended up redirecting _all_ my mail Perhaps a I need to
add
something to my SpamSieve - Move If Spam script?
I want SpamSieve to carry on moving spam to the spam folder plus I also
want those messages redirected to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Perhaps you can use this script as a starting point:
http://www.c-command.com/scripts/spamsieve/powermail-redirect-
good.shtml
e.g. by moving the:
set theRedirect to redirect m to {redirectAddress}
send theRedirect
before the else.
--
Michael Tsai http://www.c-command.com
Re: spam filters: detect same words apprearing twice?
On Jun 27, 2004, at 2:08 PM, A-NO-NE Music wrote: But I was just interested in (\s|\S). To me, it looks contradiction. How does this work? It means whitespace or non-whitespace, in other words, any character. That's what I thought, but why not (\w|\d)? That's word characters and digits; we want to include spaces. -- Michael Tsai http://www.c-command.com
Re: spam filters: detect same words apprearing twice?
On Jun 27, 2004, at 11:36 AM, A-NO-NE Music wrote: I have trouble getting used to Regex. That huge volume of Perl man is not exactly easy to read for non native English speaker (excuses, excuses...). You might find Friedel's regex book easier. It's slimmer and, I think, clearer. But I was just interested in (\s|\S). To me, it looks contradiction. How does this work? It means whitespace or non-whitespace, in other words, any character. One another question is that does AppleScript take Regex? Regex is not built-in. There's an OSAX that adds it to AppleScript: http://www.lazerware.com/software.html but I think it doesn't work on OS X. -- Michael Tsai http://www.c-command.com
Re: spam filters: detect same words apprearing twice?
On Jun 26, 2004, at 12:22 PM, listes wrote:
Then I need a classical filter. I set something up, which says
- if sender is that mailserver
- if title is non-distribution issue (or the exact sentence I know)
- if body contains Status: 5.2.2 (mailbox full)
(for all these conditions simultaneously)
then I am pretty sure this is a non-distribution-related email.
[...]
Thus, I would like to be able to specify a filter condition like: when
Status: 5.2.2 (mailbox full) appears TWICE, then...
I don't think this is possible using regular PowerMail filter
conditions. If you don't need the first two conditions, you could
create a SpamSieve blocklist rule that says Body Matches Regex:
(Status: 5\.2\.2 \(mailbox full\)(\s|\S)*){2,}
If you do need the first two conditions, I think you would need to use
an AppleScript condition. Something like:
set theString to Status: 5.2.2 (mailbox full)
tell application PowerMail 5.0
set theMessages to current messages
repeat with msg in theMessages
set theBody to msg's content
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to theString
set theCount to (length of (theBody's text items)) - 1
set filter criterion result to (theCount = 2)
end repeat
end tell
--
Michael Tsai http://www.c-command.com
Re: Spamsieve not working in 5.0? Updater
On Jun 10, 2004, at 3:24 PM, listes wrote: In my case, we found the issue in the end with Jérôme: there was an empty sender in the list containing the addresses already sent to, and because many spams are without senders, SpamSieve considered that these empty senders where to be whitelisted (!) Or, rather, PowerMail whitelisted it before it got to the step of asking SpamSieve what it thought. -- Michael Tsai http://www.c-command.com
Re: Re(2): Really annoying
On Jun 1, 2004, at 10:54 AM, Marlyse Comte wrote: Do these messages show up as Predicted in SpamSieve's log? No. The log looks like this (chi was the full header info I had posted to the list): That means that SpamSieve never analyzed this message to see whether it was spam. Somehow, your PowerMail filter that says Evaluate spam rating isn't being applied (perhaps because of other filters interfering), or isn't working. -- Michael Tsai http://www.c-command.com
Re: Really annoying
On May 31, 2004, at 8:59 PM, Marlyse Comte wrote: Anyway, SpamSieve just ceases to work, in 2 days not one spam message got sent to the spam folder, all goes into the InTray (as reported earlier). Do these messages show up as Predicted in SpamSieve's log? -- Michael Tsai http://www.c-command.com
Re: SpamSieve dosn't work anymore with PM5!
On May 25, 2004, at 2:11 PM, listes wrote: And well, since that very moment, PM5 doesn't connect with SpamSieve anymore. **all** spam falls down in my incoming folder, and I verified that the SpamSieve icon doesn't blink as it used to for each message analysed -indeed SpamSieve doesn't even start if it is not already running. It seems the only time PM talks to SpamSieve is when I manually declare a spam message (then, the SS icon blinks). I also launched my previous PowerMail 4.x, it works perfectly with SpamSieve... I suppose it's possible that the SpamSieve - Evaluate.scpt file inside PowerMail is damaged. If that's the case, re-installing 5.0 would help. -- Michael Tsai http://www.c-command.com
Re: Coupon Code
On May 24, 2004, at 1:05 PM, Anthony Sanna wrote: After I copy paste into the Coupon Code: field, the Redeem button remains grayed out. I am assuming that the code is the whole four word Arbeit. Kirc... und Juden phrase. The coupon should be CPN followed by a string of about 20 numbers. The words you are seeing are something to do with work and a church...not sure how that got into your order confirmation mail. I already have a Name and serial number entered. We're talking V2.1.4, right? If you have already entered a SpamSieve name and serial number, and these were accepted (i.e. it says, Thank you for purchasing SpamSieve...), then you do not need to enter the coupon. On May 25, 2004, at 10:19 AM, Michael Lewis wrote: Is this being put into SpamSieve itself? Perhaps you should go to SpamSieve's website and enter it there? Coupons may be entered either in SpamSieve's Purchase window or at the online store. -- Michael Tsai http://www.c-command.com
Re: Coupon Code
On May 24, 2004, at 9:44 AM, Anthony Sanna wrote: What do I do with the coupon code that came with my V5 license? SpamSieve doesn't seem to want or need it. You will need the coupon to use SpamSieve beyond the 30-day, 20-launch trial period. To apply the coupon, choose Purchase from the SpamSieve menu, enter it in the text field, and click Redeem. -- Michael Tsai http://www.c-command.com
Re: Which SpamSieve?
On Apr 22, 2004, at 7:29 AM, david.gordon wrote: Your SpamSieve corpus is stored in your Library folder, so there is nothing to move. So why does SS report that its only had a few hundred messages since 20.04.04 when I have been using it for well over a year and had thousands of message filter through? The first time you launch SpamSieve 2.1.2 or later, it will set the Statistics window to only show statistics from that date forward. However, the old statistics are still there, and you can show them by clicking the Set Date... button. The number of messages in the corpus should be unchanged. I want to use 2.1.4 (I'll update from 2.1) but surely I also want to keep my original files and statistics? No matter which version of SpamSieve you use, it will alawys use the data and statistics in ~/Library/Application Support/SpamSieve. -- Michael Tsai http://www.c-command.com
Re: SpamSieve problems
On Apr 21, 2004, at 1:38 PM, Sherman Wilcox wrote: Have you set the accounts for which SpamSieve should be active? Okay, I give: how does one do this? I believe you can do this by adjusting the mail filter for SpamSieve. Conditions: Account is AccountA Spam rating 50 Actions: Move message into folder Spam -- Michael Tsai http://www.c-command.com
Re: Spamsieve question
On Dec 4, 2003, at 8:52 PM, Mikael Byström wrote: I just installed SpamSieve 2.02 Demo and fed it 300 spams and 200 or so good mesages before I used it for new messages resulting on over 4000 lines in the corpus. It mistakenly let trough about 69 messages (127 good messages arrived, som on accounts not affe) from an account with 99% spam. I then selected them and ran the Add Spam script. Yet, when I check statistics it says that it filtered 36 good messages and 2 spams (both accurate), 0 false positives and only 1 false negative. Shouldn't the statistics function regard the 69 messages as false positives? What am I missing here? The 69 messages are false *negatives* since they're spam messages mistakenly thought to be good. As to why the statistics say only 1, that could be because the messages are duplicates. Or it could be that SpamSieve didn't actually predict that 68 of them were good; maybe another filter stopped the processing before the SpamSieve filter executed. To tell for sure, I'd have to see your SpamSieve Log file. Mail it to me at [EMAIL PROTECTED], if you like. -- Michael Tsai http://www.c-command.com
Re: connecting JunkMatcher to PM?
On Nov 26, 2003, at 1:14 PM, listes wrote: I am happily using SpamSieve in combination with PowerMail. I just discovered a new, script-based freeware that seems to even improve the bayesian filtering: JunkMatcher http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~benhdj/Mac/junkMatcher.html JunkMatcher proposes interesting matching rules to transform words modified to appear unknown (like v.i.a.g.r.a) back to their ordinary form, just before you apply the bayesian filter. On my reading, it doesn't look like junkMatcher transforms the words before they're sent Apple Mail's filter; it seems to be a separate pass to catch the spams that Apple Mail misses. In any case, this transforming pass is built into SpamSieve, so you don't need an extra script to do it. -- Michael Tsai http://www.c-command.com
Re: Re(2): Powermail vs. Thunderbird
On Friday, September 12, 2003, at 10:02 AM, Janusz Buda wrote: Let me see -- I replaced both application and scripts, allowed SpamSieve to update the corpus, then reset it. I then imported some seed spam and retrained with a few dozen good/bad messages to the corpus. I think that's the problem There are more than a thousand seed spam messages, so if you only added a few dozen good messages they may be being drowned out. Do you have more good messages that you could add? -- Michael Tsai http://www.c-command.com
Re: Re(2): Powermail vs. Thunderbird
On Thursday, September 11, 2003, at 11:37 PM, Janusz Buda wrote: Ever since updating to PowerMail 4.2 and SpamSieve 2.0 the PM filters have been setting about 90% of incoming mail (both spam and good) to Label Priority No. 7, with no recognizable pattern. I noticed that the SpamSieve 'label if spam' script has No. 7 as the default, but my PM filter is definitely set to 'move if spam'. Move If Spam also labels spam messages with priority 7. I'm not using PM 4.2 yet, as I have not been able to connect to CTM's site. How did you upgrade to SpamSieve 2.0? Did you retrain with both kinds of messages? -- Michael Tsai http://www.c-command.com
Re: Re(5): Powermail vs. Thunderbird
On Friday, September 12, 2003, at 08:15 AM, aob_ml wrote: The problem with the external filters is the obvious poplock problem, when the filter tries to connect at the same time. There's no POP locking problem with SpamSieve because PowerMail is what downloads the messages. -- Michael Tsai http://www.c-command.com
Re: PM an Spamsieve
On Monday, July 21, 2003, at 09:06 AM, listes wrote: SpamSieve automatically uses Apple's address book. To use PowerMail's, you need to set up the rule as Pat did. This is true only for the last version. Right, I forgot about PowerMail's synchronization feature. Sorry for the confusion. -- Michael Tsai http://www.c-command.com
Re: PM an Spamsieve
On Sunday, July 20, 2003, at 03:06 AM, Pat O'Halloran wrote: However I just downloaded 20 messages, half of them Spam, and the script did not execute. Selecting them all in the recent mail window and manually executing the script moved the spam to the spam folder but why is this not happening automatically, any ideas? Perhaps the messages aren't getting to that filter because of another one higher in the list. Try moving the SpamSieve filter to be first in the list. On Sunday, July 20, 2003, at 04:24 AM, Scott at HobbyLink Japan wrote: SpamSieve automatically uses your address book as a white list, so there's no need to set any conditions for running the script. Have it run for ALL messages. SpamSieve automatically uses Apple's address book. To use PowerMail's, you need to set up the rule as Pat did. -- Michael Tsai http://www.c-command.com
Re: HTML Mail/Spam Relationship
On Wednesday, May 21, 2003, at 09:03 PM, Scott at HobbyLink Japan wrote: Perhaps 1 in 20 to 30 HTML mails I get are not spam, so I'd like the option in either PM itself (can this be done with a filter? I don't know how since body filtering is not provided), or in SpamSieve, to adopt a guilty until proven innocent policy regarding HTML mail, esp. those with links to images. In PowerMail you might be able to filter based on the content-type containing html. As for SpamSieve, I'm looking at providing some special options for HTML messages. What exactly do you mean by proven innocent? Do you mean that there should be a different cutoff for HTML messages so that the slightest bit of spamminess can tip the scale? And why does Nigeria mail still get through, even though I have trained every darn one of them as spam? One would think by now that the word 'Nigeria' would alone almost be an automatic trigger, but I don't know exactly how these Bayesian algorithms work. If you get a chance, please send your SpamSieve Log file and some example messages to [EMAIL PROTECTED]. I'd like to know what's going on, too. The main trick with Bayesian algorithms is feeding them the right information. I'm working on making SpamSieve better at extracting quality information from messages. -- Michael Tsai http://www.c-command.com
Re: script syntax to keep a message from appearing in Recent Mail?
On Wednesday, April 30, 2003, at 10:43 AM, Bob Parks wrote: I know I can set up the script to file the spam in the Mail Trash, and then it does not show up in recent mail, but that clutters my trash folder (which I occasionally have to pull messages out of), with spam that I dont want. Per Rick's suggestion to move the message twice, please try changing: move m to message container spamFolderName in the script to: move m to message container Mail Trash move m to message container spamFolderName -- Michael Tsai http://www.c-command.com
Re: Declining effectiveness of SpamSieve
On Wednesday, March 26, 2003 9:13:10 PM Scott at HobbyLink Japan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Over the past month, I've noticed that SpamSieve's effectiveness at catching spam has dropped considerably. I've been training it for nearly four months now, and it has many thousands of messages to work with. Originally, it was catching about 90% of incoming spam. Now that's down to around 60-70%. On some days, I get as much spam in my inbox as the software catches. I've heard reports that this is due to the nature of the filter concept that software like this uses. I'm wondering if others are seeing the same trend, and if pruning the corpus or some other technique would be effective in returning it to its formally effective self! Pruning won't improve accuracy; it's just for saving memory. I've seen smaller degradations of accuracy when the corpus gets very large. I'm not exactly sure why this is--it may be that spam is evolving or simply that the corpus is being diluted. In any case, I would recommend backing up your Corpus.plist file and then selecting and removing all the words in the Corpus window. Then re-train using your recent spam and good messages. (You may need to save up some spam first, if you have been deleting it.) I did this in late January, and my accuracy increased from 91.5% to 98.6%, even though the new corpus only had about 1300 messages. If you want to go over this in more detail, please e-mail me at [EMAIL PROTECTED]. -- Michael Tsai http://www.c-command.com
Re: Spam Filter!!!
On Friday, February 14, 2003, at 03:29 AM, Dietmar Harms wrote: After reading the above, I threw SpamSieve off my hard disk and installed Spamfire. Advantage 1: I could import my address book so that mails from my friends are always accepted. SpamSieve 1.3 can do this, too. Advantage 2: I could tell Spamfire my mailing lists, so mails from them are always accepted, too. You can do this with PowerMail+SpamSieve by making filters that match you mailing list messages (maybe you already have them to file the messages into folders) and have the Stop applying filters to this message box checked. Then just make sure that your mailing list filters run before your SpamSieve filter. --Michael
Re(2): Spam Filter!!!
On Saturday, February 8, 2003, at 09:59 AM, Dave Burbank wrote: SpamSieve has to learn about what your spam looks like but once it does it is very reliable. As of today, SpamSieve is properly identifying 97.9% of my mail. When it sees what it thinks is spam, it moves it into a spam folder within PowerMail. I delete the contents of this folder weekly after brief review. Also, Michael Tsai (SpamSieve's developer) is always working hard to make SpamSieve better. He reads this list. Perhaps he'll chime in... I think you described it nicely. :) I'll just add that SpamSieve also learns what your non-spam messages look like, to help prevent false positives. If anyone has questions, I'm available at [EMAIL PROTECTED]. -- Michael Tsai http://www.c-command.com
