I was having some issues with my personal email the past few days, but did not have a chance to really figure out what was going on due to the holiday, Jury Duty and work until today.
I forgot I had enabled Spam Interceptor, which had begun checking my email account every 15 minutes…I was finding that messages in my IMAP inbox were gone – literally gone. Some would arrive, but while I watched they would vaporize! What was happening was that my account was being popped into by Spam Interceptor and then my inbox would get synched by a new check for messages…
Problem solved and now I am thoroughly enjoying the filtering service. While I am still operating at the free level, I can speak very highly about the accuracy. As I mentioned previously, Spam Interceptor is based on Spam Assassin, but includes additional filtering through both white and black lists as well as some authentication if you choose. The accuracy for the few hundred messages it has checked so far is extremely high, with only a single false positive and no official false negatives, though a few were put into my cache folder for review.
One serious advantage to a server based system like this is that I can easily have messages checked before reading email on my Palm or phone. I have not been able to set anything like this up on my account as I don’t have that kind of access (damn), but I actually like the idea of someone else dealing for me. The main negative at the moment is the lack of support for IMAP, which won’t be an issue if I can stop myself from checking mail through so many damn email interfaces. I dabble in Mozilla, Thunderbird and Webmail (SquirrelMail), but mainly use Mail.app. For now I am just leaving messages on the server, which is actually the Spam Interceptor server.
Setup is a snap.. you just modify your pop settings and Spam Interceptor serves as a mail proxy. From there it is business as usual with the occasional check on the site to confirm that things are working as you expect. If you decide to pay ($10/yr) youu get to tweak all the settings and add additional accounts. The free account only gives you access to a single email account. Even though I love Spam Sieve, server side filtering seems too attractive to pass up for now.