Use JunkMatcher to teach Apple Mail about spam

February, 22 2006 02:18 PM Filed in: Review
It had to happen sooner or later: spam. Yes, I know it's been around but for the most part, I've been lucky. My current set of 6 email accounts the oldest of which dates back to 2002 have escaped the attention of the spammers. I did have an older account which I had set up way back in 1997 that, after three years, fell under an avalanche of spam. Luckily I had already transitioned to several new accounts and was ready to move on at that point.

In recent months I've notice that my oldest active email address has become a target. I've also taken notice that today's spammers have gotten smarter because the junk I do get is mostly slipping through Mail's junk filtering mechanisms. Yes, I've dutifully used Mail's "Mark as Junk" button in a failed attempt to train Mail. In fact I've always done that but it is becoming far less affective.

Enter JunkMatcher. Download and drop it into the Applications folder. Open it with a double click and it will install a plugin for Mail and open the JunkMatcher application. Use the JunkMatcher application to configure the plugin then close the app. The plugin goes to work in the background. Anytime you want to tweak the settings open the app back up... and yes, there are many settings to tweak if you so choose. I left it alone and have thus far been very happy with the default settings. In fact, JunkMatcher has caught every single piece of junk, flagged it red, and stuck it in my junk box. Nice. Not so nice is that it has also identified quite a few non-junk items as junk. No problem, JunkMatcher is easily trained. Control click these false positives and choose "Train as Ham".

Definitely an improvement. I'd rather have it lean in that direction. Time will tell if it will learn and in turn, if Mail learns. Here are more details from the site:

JunkMatcher is a cocktail-styled spam filter for Mail.app on Mac OS X (10.3.x or later). It filters spam by conducting a wealth of tests over emails. Two types of tests are available: property tests can detect general characteristics of spam using techniques such as naive Bayesian filtering (thanks to SpamBayes) and blacklist lookup (checking if a message was sent from a spamming IP address), and pattern tests can spot keywords such as "v1ägra" or "\/Iagr á" by using patterns written in regular expressions, a very powerful language designed just for that - to describe patterns.

JunkMatcher integrates tightly with Mail.app and OS X. You don't need to keep a second app running in order to use it - the filter will automagically spring into action via a rule within Mail.app! You can even use it with Mail.app's built-in filter if you wish, in which case it will become a good teacher to the built-in filter. JunkMatcher also knows your Address Book, and you can train emails as spam/ham (good emails) directly from within Mail.app, etc.

JunkMatcher is extremely configurable. The GUI lets you tweak a gazillion of settings, analyze mis-classified emails, and even design your own pattern tests to catch more spam. You can write patterns to match many "views" of cleanly distilled emails such as the headers, the subject, the body, and even the text rendering for HTML emails (thanks to ELinks). You can also check on what JunkMatcher has done in the past and correct its mistakes if necessary, all from a very friendly GUI.

JunkMatcher evolves, too. In addition to the built-in Bayesian classifier that learns from mistakes, you can also download new pattern updates directly within the JunkMatcher GUI. Best of all? JunkMatcher is completely free (donation is welcome)! In fact, it is an open-source app so you also get the source code!


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