SpamSieve – Change the Subject!
Posted October 15th, 2003 @ 06:55pm by Erik J. Barzeski
I use SpamSieve with Entourage and it works beautifully. Sometimes, though, a false positive occurs: email that isn't spam is marked as spam. I routinely check my spam folder to see if any messages have slipped through, but with over 200 spams per day, this is tedious at best.
I've emailed Michael the idea, but here it is again: SpamSieve should change the subject of all suspected spam. It should precede the subject with [xxx] where xxx is a rating, from perhaps 001 to 100. I could sort my spam folder by subject, and reduce my quick scans for false positives to the 25% of messages least likely to be spam.
Did that make sense?
Donate Life
Posted 15 Oct 2003 at 8:11pm #
That is similar to how SpamAssassin works:
Subject: GET ALL MEDS! ANY MEDS YOU WANT CHEAP! Prescribed Online! sapqoe
X-Spam-Level: ****************
I then use procmail to route to the appropriate maildir (almost-certainly-spam)
Posted 15 Oct 2003 at 9:28pm #
I am currently using the SpamWatch feature of Eudora, which adds a new attribute to all e-mails, the percentage likelihood that the message is spam.
For scanning for false positives in the Junk mailbox, I simply sort by this column. The most likely messages to be good ("ham") have lower spam scores, and therefore sort to the top. Messages with a score of 65 or greater don't even really require scanning, so once I hit that point, it's just a brief glance before getting marked for deletion.
All of this is to say that adding the spam score to each e-mail message, in a way that allows sorting on the score itself, is immensely useful, so finding a way for SpamSieve to do this would be extremely powerful.
Posted 15 Oct 2003 at 10:32pm #
Try suggesting it to Apple, too, for Mail.app: http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback/
Although I have a feeling you don't like Mail 😉
Posted 16 Oct 2003 at 2:17am #
I also sent this suggestion to Michael a while back, for exactly the same reason as you've mentioned here. He said it might be possible, but in the meantime suggested sorting the spam mailbox by subject for easier scanning.