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

Properly using "Junk Mail" in mail.app

T

TemeculaMac

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 8, 2007
109
0
Hi,
I'm getting very frustrated with the amount of junk mail coming in. I have my own pop server with Spam Assasin installed. It filters out around 75% of the spam. Of the 25% that make it through, I'm LUCKY if mail.app detects 10% (of the 25%).

In windows, I was using "Spam Bully" to detect my spam. Of the 25% spam that makes it through, Spam Bully honestly detects ~99.9% of the spam. It learns the emails I mark as spam, and very rarely makes a mistake.

...then I go to my mac...and hardly any of my mail is being marked as junk/spam.

I have the following settings in preferences for junk mail:
Enable junk mail filtering
Move it to the junk mailbox
The following are exempt from filtering:
(all of these are checked in this section)
Trust junk mail headers set by my ISP

Furthermore, does the junk filter in mail.app not "learn" what is spam when I specify that it's spam? It doesn't seem to be doing any learning.

Any help to rid me all of this junk email coming through, would be VERY much appreciated. I'm even okay buying a 3rd party app, if it'll work as well as Spam Bully did for me.

Thanks!
Gary
 
FWIW, I send all spam to spam@mac.com so they can get to the root of it and stop it. Make sure to show long headers. Since I started doing this, I seem to get less and less spam. I know that is not what you are looking for, but it does work.
 
Thanks skybolt. I'll start forwarding the spam with long headers to them. I've been watching my emails come through since I posted. I've had 102 junk messages between all my accounts (12 accounts). Of the 102 junk messages, NOT ONE of them was flagged as junk.

How does mail.app junk filter rate mail? How does it learn spam?

Frustrated,
Gary
 
TemeculaMac said:
... Of the 102 junk messages, NOT ONE of them was flagged as junk.

...
Click to expand...
Have you ever put Mail into learning mode? It should flag certain messages as junk before you teach it, but teaching it greatly improves its accuracy. Properly taught, Mail should properly identify your junk with few, if any, false positives. Having used it on three computers since MacOS X 10.0, I find that it works and works well.

Having said that, it is important to understand that junk mail is not a static thing. Spammers change their tactics to thwart junk filters. However, you may teach Mail to identify the new junk mail formats.
 
Thanks for the reply, MisterMe. I noticed in previous versions of mail, it had a "learning" mode. However, I thought the newest version is always in "learning" mode. For the past 6 months, I've been using the "Junk" icon to flag all junk/spam mail. However, the EXACT same message can come through (with the identical headers), yet mail doesn't flag it as junk.

Do I need to put mail into "learning" mode? If so, how do I do that?

On a side note, I've been using SpamSieve for the past few hours. It's detected all of the spam so far (I gave it ~1000 spam messages and ~1000 good messages to learn). I would've expected Apple mail to do the same, but so far it's not.

Thanks again,
Gary
 
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