A big YES, Dennis, highly recommended!
Bye R@y
I do use SpamSieve as a spam filtering drone on a Mac mini here for my ISP email account (which has poor spam filtering) and some accounts on a domain that I own, and an old Yahoo email account that I rarely use but do monitor. It’s great when I’m away from home - I just move the few messages that don’t get caught by spamsieve to a “train spam” folder on that account. Works super-well for us.
My recommendation; Install SpamSieve and train it as directed. Best USD I invested. Have been using it since many years and it saved me more time than most.
What @janesprando is referring to is that she regularly marks TidBITS as spam accidentally because of the proximity of certain buttons in her email client.
When she does that, Comcast reports the action back to Amazon SES, which flags Jane’s address so it doesn’t receive any more messages. I have to go in and remove Jane’s address from the Amazon SES suppression list before she can receive any more messages.
This is all working as it should; the problem is the accidental clicks that cause TidBITS to be marked as spam.
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As an aside, if one is using Apple Mail, you can rearrange the buttons (right-click and choose “Customize Toolbar”).
For me, I moved the “Junk” button far to the right, away from “Delete” since I rely upon SpamSieve for spam, and I delete a lot of mail every day.
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@ace I read my email on my iPad with the Comcast App and not Apple Mail. I can see if I can move the icons. They are less then 1/8” apart on my screen. And what makes it worse is that I have Osteoarthritis. The tips of my index/ and middle fingers are about a 30 degree angle to the right. So I try hard not to hit the spam button unless I intend to.
What even makes it more annoying is that Comcast does not give any time leeway to remove an email from spam. Yesterday I was selecting Trash to delete a Nextdoor email and my finger hit the Spam icon instead. It literally took me just seconds to open the Spam folder and mark Nextdoor as not spam, but the damage was done. Nextdoor sent an email asking if I intended their emails to be spam. But I am going to see if I can move the icons or ask Comcast if there is a way.
Drat—it’s pretty unlikely you’ll be able to tweak the Comcast iPad app.
It might be worth trying a different email app on the iPad sometime.
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Two possibilities:
The original message had a “Bcc:” header line. There’s nothing preventing a mail client from including it, but it pretty much defeats the point of Bcc. Likely a broken mailing list server.
There is no “Bcc:” header in the message, but Apple created one based on the envelope data (the “RCPT TO:” command during the delivery process) when it received the message. But I doubt this is the case, because you would have seen it with more than that one message.
First you have to check to see WHICH buttons for Delete & Junk you have installed. The default is the co-joined one but there are also separate ones. I replace the co-joined icon with the separate ones and then put a space between them. I also put a space between the Junk & Archive buttons.
The point is, there’s no connection ultimately between the SMTP “envelope” and the headers the sender includes in the message itself. Many mail servers remove the BCC line as a courtesy, but it’s not required. And depending on how the messages are submitted, it may indeed be harmless, even beneficial; as long as the sender takes care to include the BCC line(s) only on the copies of message(s) that are directed only to the intended recipient(s), it doesn’t actually represent a problem for the requirements of BCC (though I will always frown on it, in principle). The only lines added by a standards-compliant SMTP server (others may add others) are the “Received” trace fields, which may include the “for” clause which indicates the envelope recipient (typically only occuring at all only when there is a single recipient), and which contains the details of a message handoff from one SMTP agent to the next, and the “Return-Path” field, which gives the return address contained in the SMTP envelope sender, if any, and is guaranteed to be the only field of its kind that is inserted by the final server responsible for delivery. Other than that, classical SMTP is essentially transparent, but I fear further discussion of this would just derail things needlessly …
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I am wondering whether the core issue is with Apple’s server-side spam filtering. . . There seem to be many complaints online about the effectiveness of Apple’s filters, particularly when they prevent bona fide email from being delivered.
I have been using the privacy-oriented Runbox.com for a number of years. One thing I noticed after I switched to it is the effectiveness of its filters. Very little spam gets through; I can go days without SpamSieve sending a message to our local Junk folders.
Another plus over Apple is that customer service is 24/7 and extremely helpful. Of course, Runbox is not a free service but it isn’t expensive either. My wife and I have 4 accounts ( 2 addresses each) and the cost is $4.90/month for an annual subscription. We use our own domain.
Email spam has never really been a problem for us since we have been taking various precautions since going online in 1997. (For many years our average annual spam total was less than 10 messages.) But there came a time when the spam picked up although our experience has never been a serious distraction or time suck.
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“The tips of my index/ and middle fingers are about a 30 degree angle to the right.”
Have you tried using a stylus? I developed problems with fingertip pain a while back (too many touch screens and bad keyboards though the years?), and am also starting to find it stressful to keep any of my fingers straight for long. If your iPad can use an Apple Pencil, it’s wonderful and much more accurate and comfortable than using my fingers. There’s also the somewhat cheaper Logitech Crayon and other bluetooth styli. But even a cheap capacitive stylus is good; I use one all the time for the phone.
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For the past three weeks I’ve been trying SpamSeive based on the positive comments here. It took a little bit to install and configure but nothing the average user couldn’t manage.
To be perfectly honest, I don’t see it making much difference to my accounts. I have two primary accounts - an MS Exchange account for work and an iCloud account (with several aliases) for private use. I’d say I’m getting the same amount of spam as I do normally - despite quite thorough training.
It may be more useful on accounts which are a bit more ‘open’ but I didn’t really see the value. Of course as with all things tech, ymmv.
I do use SpamSieve, with an always-running Mac mini (in the last few years with the remote training scripts, so that I can train it from my iPhone or iPad when I am away from home.) But I use it only on the Mail accounts that already have poor spam server-side spam filtering - the ISP account that my wife and I share, a old Yahoo account, and some accounts on my own domain that don’t filter spam well. For me, it’s been a fantastic product. Our ISP email account in particular gets so much junk that it makes using it on a mobile device almost painful without spam filtering; I was using a windows mobile “smartphone” at the time, so it’s been useful to me for that purpose basically from the start. I think I have to move a message to my trainspam folder maybe once or twice a month, and it’s far more rare to have a message be marked spam that shouldn’t be.
I don’t really need it nor use it for my Gmail account or for my Fastmail account - both have great server-side spam filtering that seems to learn from me marking the occasional improperly marked message as good. And I do have an iCloud account that I don’t use often, but, again, haven’t started using spamsieve with that account.
I just upgraded to version 3 and when I was looking for my license info I found that I’d purchased my version 2 license in April 2007 - so I’ve now paid $50 for 16 years of spam filtering. For me it’s easily one of the best valued Mac apps I’ve ever purchased.
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SpamSieve doesn’t prevent you from getting spam; rather, it automatically moves it to the Junk mailbox. If that’s not happening for you, please contact us.
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I understand this, it was doing it fine, and my wording probably described it badly.
I just didn’t see much difference to the default junk mail filtering. As mentioned earlier, I believe both Exchange and iCloud already have pretty strong filtering and we’ve customised our Exchange spam settings to eliminate a lot of cruft.
I’m sure it’s very useful for many folk.
Fair enough. For whatever reason, people seem to have wildly varying experiences with popular mail providers like iCloud and Gmail. For some, they catch lots of spam; for others, almost nothing. Some people find that the biggest problem is good messages that they mistakenly move to Junk, and SpamSieve can also help in that case by rescuing the good messages back the inbox.
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Yup, this is me. The problem is iCloud’s over-aggressive filtering, which SpamSieve can undo to a certain extent (along with SaneBox’s “@SaneNotSpam” feature). Glad the checking of non-inbox mailboxes is now a primary feature of SpamSieve 3.
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The ‘good’ email going into the spam folder is a problem for me. Comcast/Xfinity is my ISP. I swear it takes just 1 second for them to designate an email as Spam and you can’t “un spam” it!
I have been getting lots of USPS and Costco spam emails. So I usually go down the list of my emails and designate the ones I think are spam and hit the spam button. Well, last week the USPS Informed Delivery got sent to spam and the emails from them stopped. I figured easy fix —delete the App and sign up again. Nope —my email address is still “bad” I have spent hours trying to find someone to talk to and came across a USPS HELP email address. I explained what happened with the USPS Informed Delivery. Their answer was to mark it as NOT Spam and I would be fine. Nope. I explained that my email address must be on same USPS spam list and it needs to be moved. Their answer was Comcast is the problem and to contact them.
So I also inadvertently sent a Costco email to spam. When was at the Costco store, the Customer Service rep said I had “opted out” of spam email and he opted me back in. Fixed? Nope! Can’t find a Costco help number to talk to someone.
Does anyone know if Comcast can indeed “un-spam” an email? Or any suggestions on how I get emails from USPS Informed Delivery and Costco back?