SPAMSIEVE GAVE ME BACK MY COMPUTER

Spam almost changed my computer's life. Well actually it almost changed how I work with my computer. And that change came about gradually which made the realization harder to identify. You see, I used to get a few hundred pieces of spam a day. Now I realize that amount of spam would be staggering for most but for me, it's just part of the job. As a newspaper columnist and radio talk show host, I get a large amount of unsolicited emails from Public Relations firms and independent sources pitching me with all kinds of products and services with the hope that I will write or talk about them. But as the years went by using the same email address along with the increase of spam on the Internet, the hundreds of spams a day slowly grew into the thousands. As of today, I get around 14,000 spams a day and there's no end of it in sight.

With that amount of junk email a day, my way of dealing with it caused some changes including how I managed my computer. For example, I used to turn off my computer at the end of the day. Now I have to leave it on all the time because if I turn it off when I'm finished, the next morning when I turn it on, the process of downloading the thousands of emails that have accrued during the evening is so large, that the process of just downloading them was taking nearly an hour. And by the time that hour of downloading finished, so much more spam had been received by the server, that another half hour or so was needed to download that batch of several thousand. And when that finished, more time was needed to retrieve the next batch of spam and so on. So eventually, I'd catch up with the process of downloading which took over two hours, and then I had to sift through them which took even more time. It was just a mess and I had to do something about it.

Downloading and installing Network Magic from the Pure Networks' website is pretty straight forward. Versions are available for both Windows and Macintosh. You will need to install a copy of Network Magic on every computer connected to your network. Once installed, Network Magic proceeds to analyze your existing setup and helps in making all the connections to all the right places. Once the network is in place you will be able to perform many of the sharing and security function with little to no effort on your part. For example, you will be able to share peripherals like your printer with any other computer on your network. Normally to accomplish this you have to configure a number of Windows settings to be found on several networking dialog boxes. Adding a Macintosh only adds to that number. But when you install Network Magic on each computer on your network, these tasks are done for you automatically. You just begin printing without having to worry about how it's working. Network Magic makes sure it all works. To help you visualize everything, Network Magic creates a one screen home network map so you can literally see which printers are available on your network and which of those are online and offline at any given moment.

Don't think that I didn't already have junk email filters in place since of course I did. But the junk filters that come with mail programs just aren't up to the job when the numbers are so big. I needed something else and until recently, there was nothing in sight. I couldn't use challenge-response systems which ask senders to verify themselves by responding to a text image. Too many were simply refusing to be bothered with the additional burden and I was missing out. White lists were no good for me either because so many emails come to me unsolicited. I can't white list someone I don¹t know. What I needed was some kind of super junk email filter that would somehow know what was bad and good. They exist and they all use something called Bayesian filtering.

Bayesian spam filtering is a type of statistical analysis that calculates the probability of an email being spam based upon its contents. But the heart of what makes this really work is the person using it. As email comes in, you train the filter by telling it what is and isn't spam. The more you train it, the better its accuracy becomes in identifying junk email. The one I use on my Macintosh is SpamSieve. It takes about 300 or so emails to effectively train the filter which in my case was a cakewalk. And in just a few short days, the accuracy became so good that SpamSieve's accuracy in detecting spam on my computer is now at about 99.8 percent. Now have my computer back. Well, almost. Of course I still have to download everything so I still have to keep my computer on 24 hours but looking at the screen in the morning displays only my real email. It's a thing of beauty.

The other thing I like about SpamSieve is that if integrates with all of the popular email programs like Apple Mail and Entourage. And if you decide to change mail clients later on, you don't have to retrain SpamSieve since it can apply the same statistics its accrued to the different email applications. I went from using Apple Mail back to Entourage and SpamSieve didn't skip a beat. I still had all the filtering in place.

So if spam has you down, I suggest you try an email filter that uses Bayesian filtering. On the Mac, SpamSieve is my recommendation as it offers additional features such as Address Book integration. There are several filters that use Bayesian filtering available for Windows and can be found with a simple Google search. But no matter which one you decide to use, you can be sure that your spam problem will be greatly reduced if not completely eliminated.

SpamSieve is for Mac OS X, sells for $30 and is available at c-command.com/spamsieve.