popfile is great - I had it set up to not only recognize spam, but also correctly separate work email from private email from all the newsletters.

Then for a while i just couldnt make popfile run on my windows and I used the bluesquirrel one - spam sleuth - quite an interesting system as it will score based on so many different methods and automatically do challenge/response for messages in a

But when i reinstalled my machine i kind of had the same experience, all i had backed up somehow didnt work and it had lost all it's configuration and I stopped using it.

I just use what fastmail does at the moment and it's working ok, although nowhere near the great fit that popfile did.

Although nowadays it's those random text with spam in an image one that get through pretty much any bayesan filter :(

some good advice there but I wouldnt call all of them fundamental commandments

I think it's because there are so many different needs... and so many different ways to get organised.
I tried a few recently (since i was planning to scan 1500 or more negatives and already have quite a few images from digital cameras)

Quite a few were totally inadequate with what i wanted to do, which was be able to tag my images with multiple tags (type of image, what's on it, who's on it, where is it etc.) mostly by ticking categories which i control and adding some keywords. And be able to do that on multiple images at once. Then be able to search quickly. Display speed was also a big requirement, i don't like waiting for a page of pics to load.

A lot of image manager tools are simple browsers with a bit of iptc/exif support, very family/casual in emphasis.

I liked idimager and imatch a lot for managing and tagging images. As I recall (it was November) there was much to like about both and quirks in both, but one of the two was much faster (i think it stored even thumbnails in its database) and the other more "transparent" to be able to write scripts that integrate with but alas was a pain when getting images from the scanner.

Acdsee was a bit weaker on the categorisation/management than the two above, but adequate nonetheless. In the latest version the quick image edit tool has some very good defaults, which really surprised me. The photoshop elements little management module was actually quite slick to use but was not very useful on the import side of things (i guess they expect people to use Bridge or some other workflow tool, or be simple and just move files around) and it lacked some of the features the others had.

Anyway I bought an older version of acdsee as everyone told me they were faster, and it still had the basic features that i liked on the scanning workflow side. It makes scanning one strip of negatives after another smoother than the others did, and it's also the only one i found that allowed me to edit all exif fields, so i could change the camera field from the name of the scanner to the name of the camera the picture had been taken with, and set the iso of the film etc. (and for the ones where i still had the notebooks, the aperture and shutter speed). I also like that acdsee stores almost everything with each images which means it's highly compatible with everything else, so I can switch to something else once all my importing is out of the way.

I'm probably going to re-evaluate some of the same programs once all the negatives and slides have been scanned, to decide between upgrading to the latest acdsee (where the management tools have improved and there are more database-like features) or picking one of the other management tools, idimager or imatch probably

Idimager (http://www.idimager.com/) and imatch (http://www.photools.com/) are worth a look, both of them. They're both small independent developers who are quite active in their forums and listening to their customers.