347.life

SpamFire

Last night I downloaded and configured SpamFire from Matterform Media. It Works!! I have been frustrated with Apple Mail's pathetic attempts to rid my inbox of 100+ spam mails each day for weeks and weeks. I was close to resetting my JunkMail filters (again) and starting over when I stumbled across an ad on O'Reilly.

I downloaded the free, 15-day trial of SpamFire, walked through the wizard, and sent it off to work while I slept. I woke up this morning and SpamFire had picked up 25 messages out of my inbox and Apple Mail had two clean, real, actual messages to me. WOW! In traditional Apple fashion, It Just Worked!!

How does it work?

On a simple level, SpamFire applies hundreds of pre-determined filters to every message that enters your inbox. It actually checks your account, applies the filters, scores each mail based on severity, and then downloads those which it deems to be spam. Then, through AppleScript, SpamFire tells AppleMail (or ANY other email program) to fetch your cleaned mail.

What about False Positivies?

You can manually adjust each filter or create your own filters (and scoring levels) to tweak the intensity of the filters.

What about spam that slips through the cracks?

I'll admit – two spam messages in the last 18 hours have slipped by. In order to improve the filters, an email address has been set up to forward (or better yet, redirect) spam mail that failed the filters. The paid/pro version ($29.95) of SpamFire will automagically download new filters to constantly improve the identification of spam.

I have multiple email accounts. Can it filter them all?

In the paid/pro version, YES!! I can now set up SpamFire to filter email not only for my multitude of accounts, but also for my wife, mom, dad, etc. All I need is their email settings (and their permission) and I can add accounts, filters, etc. for their mail.

Andy's Wish
I'd like to see a server version that was as easy to administer. I have been toying with other solutions/ideas for a few months. The power of the filters are similar to the SpamAssassin methodology, but the simplicity of the gui is the true winner here today.

Summary
SpamFire is a great solution to the growing problem of Spam. No matter how hard you try to keep your inbox clean by practicing safe net usage, they WILL find you. SpamFire gives me an extra layer of peace of mind and keeps my growing inbox focused on the business at hand – not hovering over my delete key. It works on OS X and OS 9. Do yourself a favor and give SpamFire a download.

Beyond Success – Chapter 4

Idea + Detail + Action = Actualization

The combination of belief plus action creates experiences that ultimatly lead to wisdom.

— An excerpt from, “Beyond Success” by Brian D. Biro.

Beyond Success – Chapter 3

“Success is peace of mind, that is a direct result of self-satisfaction, in knowing you gave your best effort to become the best of which you are capable.”

— An excerpt from, “Beyond Success” by Brian D. Biro.

Beyond Success – Chapter 2

JOHN WOODEN'S SEVEN-POINT CREED

1. Be true to yourself.

2. Make friendship a fine art.

3. Make each day your masterpiece.

4. Build a shelter against a rainy day.

5. Help others.

6. Drink deeply from good books.

7. Pray for guidance and give thanks for your blessings every day.

— An excerpt from, “Beyond Success” by Brian D. Biro.

Key Xing Still Rocks!!

Yes, I know I already wrote about this, but I had to reiterate it. I put in a feature request to John Scalo of LumaCode about 3 weeks ago. He immediately wrote back with some questions on how I would use it to clarify my request. Well, as luck would have it, I just got the latest beta announcement from John and TaDaaaa! My feature is in there. I paid $7 for the product that already rocked, and now I'm going to buy a few more copies just so I can send him some money. This little $7 program is worth every bit of $30 or $40 and with each release, he raises the value by an exponential factor.

If you do any type of repetitive tasks, repetitive typing, or just plain wish you could use that row of function keys on your keyboard, do yourself, and John, a favor; Go Buy Key Xing. — andy

Beyond Success – Chapter 1

“No one knows when each team member will have the greatest impact: the greatest element in stardom is the rest of the team.”

— An excerpt from, “Beyond Success” by Brian D. Biro.

An Irish Wish

Will Durant. “One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.” [Quotes of the Day] [Finklea.com]

OS X comes with a list of all the words in Webster's 2nd International Dictionary (234,936 of them to be precise). These words can be found in the file /usr/share/dict/words. I find it useful to search this list if I'm not sure how spell a given word by using the following command:

% more /usr/share/dict/words | grep [pattern] | more

This should return a list of words from the dictionary that contain your [pattern] (don't type the square brackets) of interest.

Another interesting file is /usr/share/dict/propernames, which is a list of common (mostly Western) names (useful if you're having difficulty coming up with a name for your newborn).

Making Radio Fly

Yesterday, after helping a friend install Radio on XP, I realized how blazingly fast his usage was versus mine. I had read that there were some 'issues' with using Radio server on the same Mac that you browse from, but even when I switched from IE to Chimera, the speed up was minimal.

Since Radio is not yet available for Linux (HINT HINT!!) I thought I'd install Radio on the XP box I have here and see if I could move my files across platforms. It took a bit of hide & seek in the migration of the files, but after about 30 minutes, everything transitioned smoothly.

I'm excited to say that Radio has never been this much fun! It is SOOOO fast now and I'm a much happier Radio user. In this new setup, I'm able to access my Radio install from the public Internet as well as from my local network so I still have the same great access at close to a 5x speed increase.

Of course, this leaves me wondering why, with all the great improvements in OS X and its use of BSD and Apache, is Radio so much slower on a Mac. Any ideas?