Mac
OS Mail
By Larry
J. Seltzer
February 25, 2003
|
Editor Rating: 
Apple's ads for its operating system Mac OS X 10.2 ($129 direct)
tell you you'll get "Mail: Hold the Spam" with the
included Mac OS X Mail program. We decided to put OS X Mail through
the same tests we used for our Windows-based spam fighters. Of
course, Windows users can't use OS X Mail; you have to take the
whole gorilla to get the banana.
OS X Mail's spam filtering didn't quite live up to Apple's
claims, though it avoided false positives well: Only 1.8 percent of
our legitimate mail was identified as spam. OS X Mail was only
average, however, at blocking real spam; even after training, nearly
a quarter of our spam still got through. We place greater weight on
making sure a product does no harm, but we'd prefer not having to
make the trade-off.
Apple gives you a lot of freedom to define treatment of spam. You
can add conditions to OS X Mail's filtering rules and control what
it does with spam. For example, instead of junking all spam, you
could forward messages that meet certain conditions to your ISP's
complaint department.
OS X Mail has two spam-filtering modes: Automatic and Training,
as well as Off. In Automatic mode, which you'd typically turn on
after training, spam is moved to the Junk folder. Training mode
leaves junk messages in the in-box but flags them. For messages
classified as Junk, a large button above the preview window lets you
specify Not Junk, and vice versa. This formal training couldn't be
easier.
Apple uses language analysis to construct profiles of messages,
comparing their contents with spam messages in a preloaded database.
The spam identification improved with training, and, like Matador,
OS X Mail can automatically designate mail from someone in your
address book as legitimate.
We were frustrated—though no more than with any other product
we tested—at so sophisticated a program missing messages that, to
the human eye, were obviously spam. OS X Mail's rules missed two of
the classic Nigerian "please let me ransack your bank
account" scam messages.
Despite such misses, we're still impressed with Apple's foray
into client-side spam protection. Windows programmers might want to
look into how Apple achieves such a low false-positive rate without
letting in more spam.
