Best Mac Tools: Five Indispensable Apps SpamSieve and Pith Helmet Michael Hall
I remember the first time someone demoed OS X for me. It was running on a late-2001 iBook — one of the first to come with OS X out of the box. My jaw hit the floor. It took me a few months to get a Mac of my own to experiment with, and just a few months more to ditch my Dell laptop in favor of an iBook. And then I hit a wall.
Apple provides a lot of nice apps with OS X: Safari is a good browser, Mail (or "Mail.app") is a fine mail program with decent junk filtering, iChat is a pleasant enough chat client. But none of them have ever been the exact right fit. Apple prefers to take a minimalist approach to the amount of knob-twiddling and settings-fiddling you can do with its most basic applications.
That said, here are five Internet applications I will not ever take off any Mac I own. Some of them have their flaws, but they make my daily 'net experience better than anything I could get out of the box my Mac came in:
What it does: SpamSieve works with most major Apple mail clients as a spam filter. It can be trained to learn which spam it has missed and which good mail ("ham") it has wrongly identified.
Why I use it: Coming from the Linux world, I was used to SpamAssassin. At the time, client-side spam filtering was somewhat rare in the Linux world, so I was initially put off at the idea of paying for a client-side program.
I probably would have continued to think that way if Apple hadn't included a spam filter in Mail. I tried Apple's filter, but it developed a curious tic a lot of other users noted in earlier versions: After a while it became convinced lots of mail was spam that simply wasn't. Spam filters that generate a lot of false positives are, in many ways, much worse than spam filters that miss a lot of spam.
Even though Mail's filter was letting me down, I had gotten used to the convenience of client-side whitelisting and training without writing elaborate Applescript to pipe messages into a SpamAssassin installation up on my mail server. So I gave SpamSieve a try:
It was pretty good right out of the box — nowhere near perfect, but it got a lot of spam without being trained.
Training it is easy: Two hotkeys allow the user to identify missed spam or teach SpamSieve to recognize mail that isn't spam after all.
It has a simple and convenient slider interface. If you think it's being too aggressive, you can tell it to back off a little and let more suspected spam through. If it's not catching enough, you can turn it up.
It color-codes mail it thinks is spam. If you sort your spam box by label color and remember to train SpamSieve, you can eventually stop worrying about picking through most of the spam it identifies because the false positives almost always end up very near the top of the list, with the obvious spam sitting at the bottom.
I still use SpamAssassin, by the way. If SpamSieve has one drawback, it's one common to every client-side filter: The machine you're running it on has to give up memory and processor time to examine each message. By running SpamAssassin on my server and letting it handle the worst spam, SpamSieve works really well as mop-up for borderline cases. SpamAssassin is much easier to tune in that role, too.
What it does:
Pith Helmet is "an extended site preferences and ad blocking plug-in." It also offers capabilities similar to those provided by the Firefox add-on Greasemonkey.
I don't know what you think of ad blocking. In general, I'm against it. I don't think it's fair to blow off sites dependent on ad revenue with comments like "get a new business model." But because I've been using operating systems besides Windows for years, I'm acutely aware of how hard some sites can be on browsers that aren't Internet Explorer, and how poorly optimized content plugins like Flash can be. I also draw the line at popups and popunders.
So for someone like me, who will generally tolerate ads but sometimes wants to control them, Pith Helmet is perfect.
Pith Helmet is a Safari add-on, although it will also work with other browsers that use Safari's Web-rendering engine. Its basic functions are ad-blocking and cookie control, but it is remarkably fine-grained.
For instance, perhaps you visit a site regularly where the ads are tolerable and you want to support the site by letting it claim your ad impressions, but its Javascript makes Safari crash, or just doesn't work. With Pith Helmet, you can create a site-specific rule that turns off ad blocking and also turns off Javascript. Or maybe you visit a site that uses an ad server that's frequently down and stuffs up page downloads. With Pith Helmet, you can write a rule that targets only ad content from that server.
Pith Helmet can also rewrite URLs on the fly. If you're a Salon subscriber, for instance, and prefer to go straight to the printer-friendly versions of all the stories, if you know how to write a regular expression, you can write a Pith Helmet rule to do just that. Better yet, you can share rules you create with other Pith Helmet users at the Pith Helmet rule exchange. I've contributed three, including the one for Salon.
Sometimes, Pith Helmet's Javascript and ad blocking cause problems. Fortunately, there's a menu item that allows you to reload a page with no filtering.
