Two useful mac apps

I just bought two useful Mac apps, SpamSieve and EagleFilter.

SpamSieve (USD30) does a better job than Apple Mail at identifying spam as spam. A particularly nice feature is this:

Picture of color-coded mailbox

The color coding shows how confident SpamSieve is that the mail is spam. The mailbox is sorted by color, so when scanning for misclassified mail, I can concentrate on the last bits. That saves me a good chunk of time and probably increases my accuracy at finding false positives. SpamSieve, for me, puts non-spam in the spam mailbox about as often as Apple Mail does (about once a week).

The other program, from the same person, is EagleFiler (USD40).

Picture of EagleFiler

I tried a variety of the “put your life in a database” programs, and this fit me the best. It lets me be hierarchical, unlike Yojimbo. It supports tags and leaves everything as plain files in the filesystem, unlike DEVONthink Pro. It’s not as kitchen sinky as SOHO Notes. And it was better than Mori in some way I don’t remember. The thing I like about it best is that there’s a single global hot key for saving the thing you’re looking at into EagleFiler—no dragging things from where you are to some buried window (though you can do that if you like). So I run through my RSS feeds, notice something interesting, and F1 it away for later investigation. Every once in a while, I look at my unfiled entries, tag them, and put them somewhere useful.

The other thing I like about it is that it’s geared toward handling big mail archives. I’ve not played with this much. But with 1.8G in ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes, it seems like I ought to.

(Am I the only person who thinks that Spotlight has been a big disappointment? I loathe the user interface, both the global one and the one in Mail. And it’s nowhere instant enough.)

2 Responses to “Two useful mac apps”

  1. huperniketes Says:

    I’m glad you found a digital notebook app that matches your workflow and is to your liking. There are a such a variety of entrants in the field that none of us could hope to be the end-all to every user. I am, however, always interested in improving my product’s quality and features. As the new owner and developer of Mori, I’m interested in knowing in what area you found Mori v1.6.2 lacking vis-a-vis EagleFiler. Since I’ve already identified some shortcomings and earmarked improvements which are scheduled for v1.7 (and v1.8), I believe now would be a good time to add any other major flaws to the update list.

    Please continue the excellent posts on agile development and testing. I’m particularly interested in how your OmniGraffle parser progresses.

  2. Exploration Through Example » Blog Archive » Cyndicate / EagleFiler bundle Says:

    […] earlier mentioned that I’ve started using EagleFiler, an organizational/searching tool. Its author announced a […]

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