Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Flooded with junk mail in Inbox

J

jhwalker

macrumors 6502
Original poster
May 31, 2011
409
750
For the past week or so, I've been getting LOTS of junk email in my Inbox that would normally go to my Junk mail folder. To be clear, I'm ALSO seeing junk mail in the Junk folder, but ALSO getting additional junk mail in my Inbox that should be sent to Junk.

I would imagine this is kind of a combo thing (i.e., server / cloud filtering / processing + local / account-level settings), but I haven't changed anything on my end, so wondering if Apple have changed something on THEIR END in the past few days that would be causing this behavior. I mean, I don't recall EVER seeing "junk" mail in my Inbox over the past several YEARS, and suddenly over the past few days, I'm getting up to dozens a day!

Anyone else seeing this?
 
Last edited:
I do have a few questions. Is the email account in question, an Apple/iCloud email account?
Additionally, if you log into your email account online (via a browser), are the 'junk' emails in your Inbox, or do they move to the Junk Mail folder?
 
circatee said:
I do have a few questions. Is the email account in question, an Apple/iCloud email account?
Additionally, if you log into your email account online (via a browser), are the 'junk' emails in your Inbox, or do they move to the Junk Mail folder?
Click to expand...
It is an iCloud account (the old "@mac.com" domain).

I don't normally use the web interface, but I'll login there and keep an eye on it for a day or two :)
 
I've monitored for a couple days now, and the online iCloud Inbox is exactly the same as my local Inbox using Mail (which I was expecting, as I have not implemented any local rules WRT junk mail handling).

In the past few days, I've only seen three what I would consider "junk" emails (i.e., borderline spamming, "blind" mailings) in my Inbox, so it may just have been a blip (as Chuckeee suggested). I'll continue to monitor over time and will update here if I see any additional changes / trends.

Appreciate the thoughts.
 
i got 'attacked' a few weeks ago. thousands of spam emails coming in rapidly... apparently to distract me from the fact that someone got in to my wireless account and ordered an ipad pro. i shut it all down, but still get some junk dribbling in... daily. fun times... 😔
 
  • Wow
Reactions: jhwalker
I get from time to time spam coming in on Apple email accounts but a bigger problem is mail I should be getting ending up in junk mail though the sender's name has shown up on other mails in the proper inbox.
 
  • Like
Reactions: AlumaMac
jhwalker said:
For the past week or so, I've been getting LOTS of junk email in my Inbox that would normally go to my Junk mail folder. To be clear, I'm ALSO seeing junk mail in the Junk folder, but ALSO getting additional junk mail in my Inbox that should be sent to Junk.

I would imagine this is kind of a combo thing (i.e., server / cloud filtering / processing + local / account-level settings), but I haven't changed anything on my end, so wondering if Apple have changed something on THEIR END in the past few days that would be causing this behavior. I mean, I don't recall EVER seeing "junk" mail in my Inbox over the past several YEARS, and suddenly over the past few days, I'm getting up to dozens a day!

Anyone else seeing this?
Click to expand...
lately ive noticed that people ive been emailing for at least 15 years are now ending up in my spam folder!!! WTF...I just gave a guy my email to send me a song and it went straight to spam as well...
 
MrScratchHook said:
lately ive noticed that people ive been emailing for at least 15 years are now ending up in my spam folder!!! WTF...I just gave a guy my email to send me a song and it went straight to spam as well...
Click to expand...
I get strange things like that happening as well. It forces me to skim my junk mail folder constantly.
 
  • Sad
Reactions: MrScratchHook
Taking a Quick Look through all the junk mail on my trash email account, I made an interesting observation. The apple Vision Pro must be a success, since I’ve received dozens and dozens of offers for a free AVP
 
  • Haha
Reactions: Morod
phrehdd said:
I get strange things like that happening as well. It forces me to skim my junk mail folder constantly.
Click to expand...
I've just gotten used to skimming my Junk folder almost like I do my Inbox :/ Not often, but at least a couple times a week something winds up in there I need to see.
 
  • Like
Reactions: phrehdd
I had the same problem -- almost complete failure of the MacMail spam filter to work at all. I was using SpamSieve, an excellent app, but it got all wonky re. notifications (not about doing its job) and I decided to clean it off my machine and let MacMail fly solo for a week or two. Bad decision! Inbox flooded with spam, good messages going to spam...it was as if the spam filter was drunk or high, even after a couple of weeks.

My email account couldn't be more ordinary: IMAP on my own server at hosting company, with several accounts.

Anyway, I put SpamSieve back on, it behaved itself, and all's well. Before I stared with SpamSieve, soon after it came out, MacMail's spam filtering was working reasonably well.

MacMail is a hot mess, but I can't see myself switching to anything else.
 
I get similar problems with my works email account, some day's I will get a lot of junk mail that appear in the junk folder and other days I see it in my inbox. Some day's I will see genuine emails from people I have been emailing for a number of years suddenly get put in to the junk folder. When the boss spoke to the company that provides our companies email services they replied back that their AI bot sometimes flags good emails as junk and junk emails as good. The email company's excuse was that it takes their AI bot a lot time to work out what is genuine email and what is not and that the AI bot is not perfect.

I therefore wonder if that is what is happening with regards to others having the same problem.
 
In my experience, Apple's junk mail filters stick for a while before they get circumvented so it's not uncommon for me to see spikes and lulls in terms of the amount of junk mail I see.

My frustration stems from the fact that Apple's junk mail rules are terrible in terms of how we can control the flow of junk mail. In theory, I should be able to log into iCloud and setup a mail rule that says this: "If message is NOT from any of my contacts or previous recipients, send to junk or trash".

The fact that I can't set that up on the mail server, in 2024, is insanely stupid. Yes, I'm aware I can do that rule in the Mail app on my Mac but I've found it only works about 50% of the time before it just stops working all together. Even Spam Sieve isn't perfect but there's also a real possibility that I dont have it setup correctly either.

I've since switched to Spark Mail on my Mac and it's done a better job of handling junk mail but it's not perfect. The problem is on the iCloud mail server. It's just too limiting and basic to be effective at handling junk mail.
 
I was getting a lot of spam, but almost all of it was to my @me.com address that I no longer use. I transitioned to @iCloud.com for a clean start. I put a filter on the iCloud.com website to automatically send all email sent to @me.com to junk. I wish I could just delete the alias at this point but that's not allowed.

However, in the last couple of days, I've notices a drastic reduction in any spam getting to my junk folder. Perhaps Apple is doing some upgrades.
 
fisherking said:
i got 'attacked' a few weeks ago. thousands of spam emails coming in rapidly... apparently to distract me from the fact that someone got in to my wireless account and ordered an ipad pro. i shut it all down, but still get some junk dribbling in... daily. fun times... 😔
Click to expand...
ddgo have a duck.com free email as an alias linked to your iCloud address which has great filters and make your iCloud address completely anonymous.
seem to be for incoming only - which is the whole point i guess.
looks like this …

Screenshot 2024-03-07 at 04.45.34.png
 
monokakata said:
I had the same problem -- almost complete failure of the MacMail spam filter to work at all. I was using SpamSieve, an excellent app, but it got all wonky re. notifications (not about doing its job) and I decided to clean it off my machine and let MacMail fly solo for a week or two. Bad decision! Inbox flooded with spam, good messages going to spam...it was as if the spam filter was drunk or high, even after a couple of weeks.

My email account couldn't be more ordinary: IMAP on my own server at hosting company, with several accounts.

Anyway, I put SpamSieve back on, it behaved itself, and all's well. Before I stared with SpamSieve, soon after it came out, MacMail's spam filtering was working reasonably well.

MacMail is a hot mess, but I can't see myself switching to anything else.
Click to expand...
I've been using SpamSieve for a month now and it's calmed my inbox.
 
My experiences:

I've found the best way to deal with junk/spam email is to go directly to one's ISP mail server (most have their own web pages for email), and then set up junk/spam handling there.

The idea is to deal with it "at the server level" BEFORE Apple Mail.app interacts with the ISP server and "brings the junk to you".

Other than that, one can create junk/spam rules and hope most of it gets taken care of that way.
 
  • Like
Reactions: zevrix
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back