Spam filter for Mac OS 9 with Outlook Express?

December 25, 2004 10:09 PM

SpamFilter: My Dad is using a Mac G3, OS 9.2 with Outlook Express. He is in need of a good anti-spam program. He is a smart guy, but not the most computer savvy. I use Mailwasher on my computer (PC). I think it would be good for him (easy to use, straight-forward interface), but there is not a Mac version. Any recommendations?
posted by ObscureReferenceMan to computers & internet (9 comments total)

Any chance you can get him to switch to Mozilla? I find the junk mail filters in Mozilla work very well right out of the box.
posted by SPrintF at 10:14 PM on December 25, 2004

I should have mentioned... He's an older guy, and kind of set in his ways. He would rather get an add-on program than switch to something new.
posted by ObscureReferenceMan at 10:26 PM on December 25, 2004

Well, I'm a little bummed because I was going to recommend SpamSieve, but I checked their site and it is OS X only. It really is a great solution (it's amazing how well it works for me), but I don't know if there's an OS 9 equivalent. Anyone out there know?
posted by litlnemo at 11:07 PM on December 25, 2004

How about a gmail account? You can still use pop/smtp (so you could still use Outlook Express), and the spam filtering on it seems to work great. Gmail also lets you set the "reply-to" field, so you can still use your current address, especially if you can forward it to gmail.

On top of that, you'll also get web-based access any time you need.

I personally forward 4 accounts to my gmail account, and then use it to filter for spam, and then retrieve using OS X mail.app.
posted by MiG at 12:38 AM on December 26, 2004

SpamFire might work. I haven't used it, but someone I know likes it - it comes in an OS 9 flavor and can use basically any email software. There's a Windows version if you want to try it out for usability purposes.

At VersionTracker, it looks like there's a couple of other spam utilites for OS 9, too.
posted by milkrate at 12:50 AM on December 26, 2004

What's his ISP or where is his mail hosted? It might be easier to set up a server-side solution that he never sees.

I host my domain through pair Networks and they provide a SpamAssassin install as part of the package. It works extremely well. I like to tinker with the backend but you could do that from wherever you are and your dad would never be the wiser. If you need to train the filter a lot, you could teach him to store any spam it misses in a folder and write an AppleScript to do the training process (which basically consists of FTPing a mailbox full of spam up to the server and running one command via telnet or ssh to make SpamAssassin "learn" from what it missed the first time around).
posted by bcwinters at 9:06 AM on December 26, 2004

Mig, There's no browser that works fully with GMail for OS Classic. I can no longer send mail from my Mozilla (freezes), and IE doesn't seem to work at all.
posted by ParisParamus at 11:30 AM on December 26, 2004

Paris, that sucks. But dad wouldn't have to see gmail at all.

Just set his existing account to forward to gmail; set up his home account to check gmail via POP. He continues to use outlook, but also gets gmail as an intermediate mail filter. The only problem with this (as far as I know) is that his from: field would then display his gmail.com address after it passes through gmail's servers. He could, however, still set the reply-to as [e-mail].
posted by metaculpa at 12:16 PM on December 26, 2004

Metaculpa: that's certainly an idea. To clarify, since some feature or set of features was added to GMail in !October, I can read my GMail on my old iMac, but Mozilla beach ball-freezes when I try to reply.

The problem in just forwarding (I'm assuming the Spam would not be forwarded) is that some %ge of "spam" actually is not. So you would still need to view the GMail account.

PS: if I am mistaken, and someone is currently using OS 9.2.2, and Mozilla with GMail successfully, PLEASE SPEAK UP!
posted by ParisParamus at 2:17 PM on December 26, 2004