The Bottom Line
- Personal Antispam X5 filters spam conveniently in Mac OS X Mail and Entourage
- A combination of rules, learning Bayesian filtering and URL blacklist captures lots of junk mail
- Personal Antispam X5 can mis-identify a significant amount of good mail as spam
- In OS X Mail, using a rule to filter, Personal Antispam does not clean IMAP folders automatically
- Personal Antispam X5 requires a system restart at installation
Description
- Personal Antispam X5 filters spam in Mac OS X Mail and Microsoft Entourage.
- A learning Bayesian filter joins forces with URL and sender blacklists as well as further rules for spotting spam.
- Personal Antispam X5 can get fresh rules from online updates.
- Using the email program's filtering engine, Personal Antispam X5 moves junk to a special "Spam" folder.
- You can recover mail or mark it as spam (and teach Personal Antispam X5's filter) using the menu and keyboard shortcuts.
- A white list lets you safeguard certain senders (as well as, automatically, people in your address book).
- Personal Antispam X5 keeps a log of its message filtering and reasons for letting messages pass or deeming them spam.
- Personal Antispam X5 supports Mac OS X 10.4/5.
Guide Review - Personal Antispam X5 10.5 - Spam Filter
So far so good. It's a pity Personal Antispam X5 does not trust its content filter — and not your teaching much either. In my tests, one or the other rule found something wrong with many a good and honest email. Newsletters in particular fell prey to Personal Antispam X5, and other than adding their senders to the white list, I found no way to stop the filtering (turning off URL detection helped somewhat).
Assuming it does filter correctly, Personal Antispam X5 does so using a rule. In Mac OS X Mail, this works handsomely as far as POP accounts go. For IMAP folders and inboxes, you can "apply rules" manually and have Personal Antispam X5 scan for spam. Training, again, is easy with menu commands and keyboard shortcuts; all mail identified as junk is collected in a "Spam" folder.
