SpamSieve Keeps Your Inbox Free Of Spam [50 Mac Essentials #49]

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SpamSieve is a top-quality spam-killer for your email account, protecting you from phishing, from lures tempting you to download God-knows-what from dodgy file sharing servers, and from non-existent Nigerian princes offering untold wealth in exchange for, well, a few cash payments up front. To cover expenses, you understand.

Yes, if you have an email account, you have spam to deal with. If you use some online services (Google’s Gmail in particular) then lucky you – spam is already filtered out before it hits your inbox.

But if you run your own email account, spam is a constant irritant, and only software is going to help you deal with and stay sane.

SpamSieve works alongside Apple’s Mail application and a bunch of other OS X email clients, from the well-known to the decidedly obscure (high five to all the GyazMail users out there!).

If you use Mail, you probably know it has its own spam-zapping feature, which is pretty good, but a long way from perfect. SpamSieve is the professional compared to Mail’s enthusiastic amateur. Once installed, it fiercely protects your inbox from the spammers, but still gives you control.

SpamSieve examines incoming mail and gives it a spamminess score from zero (goof mail) to 100 (spam for sure). The app maintains a log, so you can see all the decisions it makes. It’s easy to retrain it when it makes mistakes. If your email account uses IMAP, SpamSieve can even help you keep spam away from your iOS device.

SpamSieve costs $30, which some might say is expensive for an email add-on. But stop for a moment, and remind yourself how annoying it is to see even one piece of spammy rubbish in your inbox – now multiply that by a few hundred to take in all the bits of spam you’re likely to see within a single year. That $30 seems like a bit of a bargain.

(You’re reading the 49th post in our series, 50 Mac Essentials: a list of the great Mac apps the team at Cult of Mac value most. Read more, or grab the RSS feed.)

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