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Email Applications, Clients & Spam Filters

SpamAssassin

Home Page Release Notes License:
Open source; $0

Current Version: 3.3.1 (March 24, 2010)

SpamAssassin is a free mail filtering system written in Perl that attempts to identify spam using text analysis and several Internet-based realtime blacklists. Using its rule base, it uses a wide range of heuristic tests on mail headers and body text to identify "spam", also known as unsolicited commercial email. Once identified, the mail can then be optionally tagged as spam for later filtering using the user's own mail user-agent application. SpamAssassin typically differentiates successfully between spam and non-spam in between 95% and 99% of cases, depending on what kind of mail you get. SpamAssassin also includes support for reporting spam messages automatically, and/or manually, to collaborative filtering databases such as Vipul's Razor.

SpamAssassin 3.3.1 makes a number of changes, all of which are detailed in the release announcement.

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Also See . . .

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Also, if you have an older Mac, be sure to check out the "Classic" applications page for more options.

Finally, take a look at ALEMIA if you think you know that name of an application, but aren't quite sure.

Related Links

Andrew Starr has a marvelous page of Eudora plug-ins and enhancements that Eudora users must check out. His entire site (known as eMailman) is worthwhile for every email junkie out there.

Graham Orndorff has written a superb collection of articles on setting up email servers and secure email clients on Mac OS X.

Adam Engst has put together a comprehensive overview of email attachment formats that is invaluable for anyone who wants or needs to understand the complexities behind them.

Also Consider . . .

These are applications that are newer and of potential interest, but which I haven't yet selected for permanent inclusion. Have a look, and let me know if you think they deserve to be part of the permanent collection!