14 DAY TRIAL // Bains Software is another company that released an update to one of its products these days, and SpamSweep's latest version was announced today. As everyone does this days, first thing to add when releasing a new version of a program for Mac is native support for Intel-based Macs, and SpamSweep 1.5 comes as a Universal Binary that features improved accuracy and integrates much better with various email clients for Mac OS X. These being said, I think that finding out a little more about this program won't do you any harm, so let's get to business now, shall we?
SpamSweep is an advanced bayesian spam filter that has a simple and easy to understand interface, but it includes many filtering technologies that include domain and relay blacklists, sender whitelisting and, of course, the bayesian filter that automatically deletes spam messages before they're downloaded by your email client.
Bayesian spam filtering is a form of email filtering that uses a Naive Bayes classifier to identify spam, and became well known in 2002, when Paul Graham described it in a paper called "A Plan for Spam". One of its greatest advantages are that Bayesian spam filtering can be trained on a per-user basis and it becomes better with time, "learning" what to drop and what to keep.
Getting back to SpamSweep now, I have to tell you that the program can notify you when you have new good mail by playing a sound, displaying the new messages in a floating window or simply launching your default mail client.
This spam filter comes as a shareware version free to try and that costs 25$ to buy, with the mention that the trial version can only filter one email account. SpamSweep supports any Mac that runs Mac OS X 10.3 or a later version and works with most major email clients.