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Monday's Mac Gadget
Spamfire 1.12 ($29 Shareware) If you've been using e-mail for any length of time, you've probably received one or more pieces of UCE (Unsolicited Commercial E-mail) otherwise known as SPAM. Sure, you can waste your time opening and deleting this garbage, but there must be a better way. Computers are supposed to make our lives easier, right? Spamfire is a step in the right direction... Spamfire is a program that integrates with your current e-mail program, and helps prevent SPAM from ever reaching your inbox. During setup, you'll see one way the program does this, and that is by importing addresses from your Address Box into a Spamfire "Friends" list. Reason being that if someone is in your Address Book, you probably won't mind getting e-mail from them. This, however, is just the beginning. Spamfire can also intelligently detect SPAM based on certain rules.
These filtering rules are downloaded as XML files, and will be updated if you purchase a license for the product. When Spamfire looks for SPAM, the filtering rules, which include certain key phrases, header information, destination and return address, are applied to each piece of e-mail. A score is then applied. If the score is too high, then you probably have SPAM, and it will be downloaded into Spamfire.
Don't worry, you can view the items that Spamfire has identified as SPAM, so that you can make sure something valid didn't get caught by the filters. Based on our initial experience (7 out of 7 identified items were SPAM) with the product, you shouldn't have to worry about this. To run Spamfire on an ongoing basis, you turn off automatic checking in your e-mail program, and leave Spamfire running in the background. It detects and filters SPAM, and can either let you manually check your e-mail, or launch your e-mail program after it has filtered out some SPAM. So take a shot at cleaning the SPAM out of your inbox, and give Spamfire a spin. Have any other Mac gadgets that make your e-mail experience more pleasant? Drop John an e-mail, and he'll mess around with it.
Monday's Mac Gadget is here to help you with those cool things that we all just have to have on our Macs. Shareware, Freeware, Postcardware, Emailware, and even commercial apps, Monday's Mac Gadget is here to help you find and use the best of these programs. John is a software engineer who works in the corporate R&D group of a Fortune 500 company, focusing on all aspects of communications technology. He has several degrees that claim he knows what he's doing when it comes to computers. After watching co-workers reinstall Windows, search for device drivers, and experience other horrors during the day, he's glad that he comes home to a Mac (compatible) computer. Have any comments, suggestions, or favorite Gadgets? Drop John a line at You can also Post Your Comments below. Current Monday's Mac Gadget
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