MacMost Now 99: Multiple Spam Printer Privacy

Gary Rosenzweig answers some viewer questions: Private browsing, a better way to filter spam in Apple Mail, networked printer, and getting the total file size of multiple files and folders.

Video Transcript: Hi. This is Gary with episode 99 of MacMost Now. Let's answer some viewer e-mail.
The first question comes from Dan. 'Can you give me a good idea for a spam filter? I use MacMail and have tried using rules. I think I am about up to 50 and no matter how I put them in, the spam still gets through.'
Well Dan, the Apple mail program has pretty good Spam filters in it, but there may be a reason it works better for some people than for others. For me, I use a host that hosts my domain name and all my e-mail, and they use Spam Assassin on their server. So, Spam Assassin is a program that runs on the server and filters mail as it comes in. Now, what Spam Assassin does is it doesn't actually usually get rid of the e-mail, it just kind of tags it with these hidden tags that you normally don't see. It tags it with a level of Spam. It checks things like black lists, and typical places that spam come from, and the content of the e-mail message and then it puts this little rating in the e-mail - how spammy the mail seems to be. Then I find that Apple's mail program pays attention to this stuff and actually filters e-mail a little bit better based on these ratings. In addition, you can build some tags yourself in the rules. If you look in the headings for a mail that goes through Spam Assassin you'll see that it gives a star rating for how spammy the mail may be. So, the solution may be to actually move your e-mail to another host that uses Spam Assassin or see if your current host supports Spam Assassin. You may just need to turn it on. But if you don't have control of that, there may be a better solution. You can go ahead and use a third-party e-mail filtering program. I tried out Spam Seive and you can try that out too. It seems to use basien filtering to go ahead and look at the content of your email and compare it to e-mails you've got in the past. You can kind of train it to recognize spam e-mail. So, I haven't tried it for a long period of time, so I don't know how well it works but you can give it a go. It's got a free trial.
I recently did an episode about FireFox, and Sam wrote in with this question. "Does FireFox do private browsing like Safari?"
Now, unfortunately, it looks like it doesn't. FireFox 3 has left out private browsing for now although that might be added in the future and maybe add-ons that help you.
"Here's what Sam's talking about. If you go into Safari and chose from the Safari menu, there's a private browsing option and this one will allow you to basically turn off all caching, history, saving passwords - everything that leaves a paper trail. So, it's built for basically using Safari in, let's say, a library or on someone else's computer.
Joey had a question about printers. "I live in a mixed Mac and PC home and I want all the computers in my house to be able to print to one printer. I have found a way to do this, but the computer the printer is connected to would always have to be turned on. Any suggestions?"
I know exactly what you're talking about Joey. And the way I solved it is buy buying only network capable printers. These are printers that actually plug in to the Ethernet of your home or office network, or sometimes they have a wireless connection. So, these printers don't rely on any one computer to be on. They kind of work as their own computer that only does one thing. That's print. The great thing is you can print from any computer in your office, no specific machine has to be on, and sometimes you can print from outside of your network and have the printout sitting there waiting for you when you get to the printer.
The last question today is from Kalin. "Sometimes I need to know the size of a bunch of folders, but when I select them and click Get Info, a separate information window opens for each of the folders. Is there a way to open a single information window for all folders, from which I can see their combined size?"
Yes, indeed there is a way to do this. Here's what Kalin's talking about. You click on Documents and Downloads and I do Command + I, I get two windows here showing me the size of each of the folders. Now, some may have noticed that if you click on 10 or more files or folders you actually get a combined window for them. But, you can do that for any amount of folders by simply holding the option key down. So, I'm going to select these two folders again, and I'm going to do Command + Option + I, and I get a single window, it says 'Multiple Item Info' and there I get the combined size of all those folders.
That's all the questions for today. If you've got a question for me, you can e-mail me at questions@MacMost.com. Also remember follow me on Twitter. Until next time, This is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost now.

Comments: 2 Responses to “MacMost Now 99: Multiple Spam Printer Privacy”

MacTipper

16 years ago

Cmd-Option-I creates an inspector. This means that the window will change based upon what you've clicked on.

If you want to compare two sets of folders, you can use Cmd-Ctrl-I to get the summary info. Which means that it won't change if you deselect any of the folders.

MacTipper
My Mac-Tipping Blog

bob

For network printing, you didn't mention airport express as a solution.

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MacMost Now 99: Multiple Spam Printer Privacy

Comments: 2 Responses to “MacMost Now 99: Multiple Spam Printer Privacy”

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