Years ago, back in the OS 8.5 days in fact, I discovered Spamfire and loved it. I'd grown fond of using Microsoft Entourage as my email app and the one thing it lacked "bigtime" was a decent spam filter. Spamfire fit in nicely.

I've been using Spamfire for years and used to be a big fan. I'm pretty sure I wrote a couple of laudatory reviews on Spamfire as well. But as Spamfire has grown in sophistication, it has continued to frustrate me. For instance:

There may be something to the notion that one's spam hits increase with Spamfire. It can be configured with a proxy email client that checks all your accounts and then re-sends them to your client as a sort of invisible email server running on Localhost. I think that's where the additional spam might be coming from.

It also became cumbersome to manage, occasionally something would crash and all the email account configurations would get corrupted. Then a reset would result in the last few days of emails being re-downloaded to my email client.

Worse, Spamfire was slow. It seemed to work best if I started up my Mac and did left Spamfire running in the background for thirty minutes or so before trying to check my email. Otherwise I'd get error messages and stuff.

And some of the same SPAM seemed to get through no matter how many times I flagged it. Still, the custom filters you could write were amazing.

Finally, REVENGE didn't work very well. It was fun to try and fight back, but revenge almost always crashed if I tried to revenge more than a handful of messages.

Over the years email clients have improved a great deal. Apple Mail and Thunderbird have very good spam filters built-in. I've made the switch to Thunderbird and I've tossed out Spamfire too.

I'll miss some of the features of Entourage, but I can live with Thunderbird and I don't need Spamfire any longer.

Guess what? I can check my email in about 5 seconds now instead of waiting 20 minutes.