Mail stopped Filtering Spam!

[petercw2]

In the last few days I have noticed that MacMail has stopped filtering my spam.

So I set it back to "training" mode but it seems to not want to learn anything.

All the spam comes in un"bagged" (marked) as spam.

Anyone else have this problem? Because last week it filtered out 90% of the spam just fine.

[zimv20]

i don't know if this is related, but...

about two weeks ago, i upgraded my tower to panther. suddenly, Mail.app became rather lax about junk mail. under jaguar, it caught a good 90% of the crap messages, now i'm lucky if it catches 10%.

but my ibook (also upgraded to panther) filters spam as effectively as it did under jaguar.

[petercw2]

I dunno. I have had Panther on this PB12" since just after Xmas....The filtering was working great, but then in the last couple of days it just seemed to quit and I haven't touched the settings .

So weird

[wordmunger]

I've had this happen before. Can't remember exactly what the solution was, though. One thing that works sometimes is to make sure your junk mailbox is empty. Another approach I've seen suggested on the Apple Help pages is to reset your junk mail preferences there's a "reset" button on the mail prefs page.

[lynnpye]

I've had the same problem, several times now. It appears that if I receive a completely empty email (no subject, no body, probably minimal headers, though I haven't checked that), it causes the spam filter to choke. After that, I have to recover from an old LSMMap2 copy.

Btw, what I mean by that is that you have, in ~/Library/Mail/ a file called LSMMap2. Once you have Mail filtering for awhile and have built up your rules a bit, go into Finder and Duplicate that file to make a copy, a backup. If you run into this problem again, just restore that file again. That way, you at least start filtering again with a reasonably good set of rules.

I backup that file from time to time just out of paranoia. I've been meaning to make an Applescript I can run to do it for me, but haven't gotten around to it. If anyone feels up to it, please post it here, as I'm not really very familiar with Applescript anyway.

HTH

[MongoTheGeek]

If you go into mail preferences and reset the spam filters it fixes it but then it gets slightly more stupid filtering spam for a while.

There are certain messages that if I mark as spam kills mail and causes this to happen.

[peterjhill]

My headaches with spam decreased greatly after I created a rule that says if


If ALL
Sender is not in my Address Book
From Does not Contain "cmu.edu"
move message to mailbox "Not in Addressbook"

I put this near the bottom of my rules. I also have another rule

If ALL
from contains peterjhill
from does not contain "Peter John Hill"
move message to JUNK

With these two rules, I get better control of my spam. Any message that goes to my inbox is almost certainly legitimate.

I check my not in addressbook folder when there are new messages. If I get legitimate mail from someone there, I add them to my addressbook. After a while, most of the new messages are spam, and it is an easy click - shift click to select all new messages and mark them as junk.

I highly recommend these rules.

[Nonsanity]

It can't just be a corruption of the junk mail filter file... I removed my whole Mail folder (~/Library/Mail) and let Mail build a new one. I let it re-train with two day's worth of junk (more than enough from all my accounts) and set it to auto. No dice. Either there was a bad junk email in that two day's worth that broke it again, or something else is wrong.

Actually, if it gets corrupted that easily, the problem is Apple's. But if there's some way to prevent it from happening, I'd be VERY glad to hear it. Obviously I get a LOT of spam.

[ And where does my spam come from? It almost all goes to the email address I used ONLY for registering my domain name with Network Solutions. I have their new privacy option turned on, but who knows how long that will take to be effective. Maybe never. ]

~ Nonsanity
~ Fluff & Such
~ http://www.fluffandsuch.com/

[David Lundgren]

All of a sudden the other day the same thing has happened on my Powerbook. Mail was doing a great job for months, now it's absolutely stupid. i've reset the Junk rules several times... it's not getting the message, so to speak. My other rules all still work, but all the crap is going right into my In box and staying there. Can't figure this out at all, and God knows I don't want to go to Entourage, but my my business is very dependant on email, and we can't have this!

[electric]

I had the same problem but solved it by un checking and re checking "enable junk Mail filtering" option in mail preferences.

It worked for me.

T

[jacg]

Mail stopped spam filtering for me about a week ago. Have tried all resetting suggestions to no avail. It also keeps leaving an unread message in the junk folder which I cannot find or delete.

Since the Apple discussions seem to have died I'd appreaciate any help here.

Perhaps Apple uses Mail.app to run the discussion boards?

[beerguy]

A recent tactic of spammers is to include a pile of garbage text in their emails. The sole purpose for doing so is that it plays havoc with filters. About all you can do is regularly backup the filter files as was mentioned above.