5/16/2023 0 Comments Spamsieve memoryWith Pith Helmet, you can write a rule that targets only ad content from that server. Or maybe you visit a site that uses an ad server that’s frequently down and stuffs up page downloads. With Pith Helmet, you can create a site-specific rule that turns off ad blocking and also turns off Javascript. Its basic functions are ad-blocking and cookie control, but it is remarkably fine-grained.įor instance, perhaps you visit a site regularly where the ads are tolerable and you want to support the site by letting it claim your ad impressions, but its Javascript makes Safari crash, or just doesn’t work. Pith Helmet is a Safari add-on, though it can also work with other browsers that use Safari’s Web-rendering engine. So for someone like me, who will generally tolerate ads but sometimes wants to control them, Pith Helmet is perfect. I also draw the line at popups and popunders. I don’t think it’s fair to blow off sites dependent on ad revenue with comments like “get a new business model.” But because I’ve been using operating systems besides Windows for years, I’m acutely aware of how hard some sites can be on browsers that aren’t Internet Explorer, and how poorly optimized content plugins like Flash can be. I don’t know what you think of ad blocking. What it does: Pith Helmet is “an extended site preferences and ad blocking plug-in.” It also offers capabilities similar to those provided by the Firefox add-on Greasemonkey. It’s much easier to tune in that role, too. By running SpamAssassin on my server and letting it handle the worst spam, SpamSieve works really well as mop-up for borderline cases. If SpamSieve has one drawback, it’s one common to every client-side filter: The machine you’re running it on has to give up memory and processor time to examine each message. If you sort your spam box by label color and remember to train SpamSieve, you can eventually stop worrying about picking through most of the spam it identifies because the false positives almost always end up very near the top of the list, with the obvious spam sitting at the bottom. It color-codes mail it thinks is spam.If it’s not catching enough, you can turn it up. If you think it’s being too aggressive, you can tell it to back off a little and let more suspected spam through. It has a simple and convenient slider interface.Training it is easy: Two hotkeys allow the user to identify missed spam or teach SpamSieve to recognize mail that isn’t spam after all.Nowhere near perfect, but it got a lot of spam without being trained. It was pretty good right out of the box.Spam filters that generate a lot of false positives are, in many ways, much worse than spam filters that miss a lot of spam.Įven though Mail’s filter was letting me down, I had gotten used to the convenience of client-side whitelisting and training without writing elaborate Applescript to pipe messages into a SpamAssassin installation up on my mail server. I tried Apple’s filter, but it developed a curious tic a lot of other users noted in earlier versions: After a while it became convinced lots of mail was spam that simply wasn’t. I probably would have continued to think that way if Apple hadn’t included a spam filter in Mail. At the time, client-side spam filtering was somewhat rare in the Linux world, so I was initially put off at the idea of paying for a client-side program. Why I use it: Coming from the Linux world, I was used to SpamAssassin. It can be trained to learn which spam it has missed and which good mail (“ham”) it has wrongly identified. What it does: SpamSieve works with most major Apple mail clients as a spam filter. Some of them have their flaws, but they make my daily ‘net experience better than anything I could get out of the box my Mac came in: That said, here are five Internet applications I will not ever take off any Mac I own. Apple prefers to take a minimal approach to the amount of knob-twiddling and settings-fiddling you can do with its most basic applications. But none of them have ever been the exact right fit. And then I hit a wall.Īpple provides a lot of nice apps with OS X: Safari is a good browser, Mail (or “Mail.app”) is a fine mail program with decent junk filtering, iChat is a pleasant enough chat client. It took me a few months to get a Mac of my own to experiment with, and just a few months more to ditch my Dell laptop in favor of an iBook. It was running on a late-2001 iBook - one of the first to come with OS X out of the box. I remember the first time someone demoed OS X for me.
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