mail.app spam rules help?

Posted:
in Mac Software edited January 2014
I like mail.app (2.0.7 under 10.4.6,) but this one problem is driving me crazy. I have junk mail filtering enabled. In preferences, under 'The following types of messages are exempt from junk mail filtering:' I have checked both 'Sender of message is in my Address Book' and 'Sender of message is in my Previous Recipients'. The problem is that I have a domain, say example.com, and I have the address [email protected] in my address book, yet emails from [email protected] still go into my junk mail folder.



Is there something that overrides the 'Sender of message is in my Address Book' setting? Is my mail.app borked? Does anyone else experience this?



Another annoying thing (or maybe I just don't know how to use the program) is that when I find a false positive in my junk mail folder, and tell mail.app it is not junk, I expect that it would in the future remember that address is not junk. But it doesn't. Is there something I can set somewhere that would exclude messages from junk mail filtering if (something like) 'Address has previously been marked as Not Junk.'



My eternal gratitude for any light that can be shed on this.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 8
    cosmonutcosmonut Posts: 4,872member
    I would like to know the same things. I get 2 daily e-mails from the same Web site and sometimes both go to the Inbox, sometimes one goes to Junk and the other goes to the Inbox, and then other times both go to Junk. Meanwhile I still get all kinds of Viagra spam and crap in my Inbox.



    I really don't get it.
  • Reply 2 of 8
    mr. memr. me Posts: 3,221member
    Have you guys trained Mail's SPAM filter yet? If not, then put it is training mode for a couple of weeks. When it flags all of your SPAM with no false positives, take it out of training mode.
  • Reply 3 of 8
    cosmonutcosmonut Posts: 4,872member
    I'll give training mode a try.
  • Reply 4 of 8
    johnrpjohnrp Posts: 357member
    I don't have problems with wrong mail being marked as spam but I do have an overload or regular spam



    will mail keep "training" even in regular operation mode as I mark these as spam or does it only learn when in training mode ?



    j.
  • Reply 5 of 8
    mr. memr. me Posts: 3,221member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by johnrp


    I don't have problems with wrong mail being marked as spam but I do have an overload or regular spam



    will mail keep "training" even in regular operation mode as I mark these as spam or does it only learn when in training mode ?



    Huh? What do you mean by regular spam? I am not aware of categories of spam or degrees of spam. A message is either spam or it is not. The properly trained Mail spam filter should flag it and automatically route it to your Junk folder. I gather that the Mail junk mail filter continues to improve as you manually identify spam, whether in training mode or not.
  • Reply 6 of 8
    johnrpjohnrp Posts: 357member
    by regular spam i mean the constantly evolving spam trying to sell via6ra, vibrating rings, software and phishing for bank details



    j.
  • Reply 7 of 8
    mr. memr. me Posts: 3,221member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by johnrp


    by regular spam i mean the constantly evolving spam trying to sell via6ra, vibrating rings, software and phishing for bank details



    j.



    Spam is spam. There are the Viagra come-ons, the African get-rich-quick-schemes, the sex ads, pirated software offers, and who knows what else. It's all of a piece. It is true that spam senders develop new techniques to thwart junk mail filters. Just place Mail's junk mail filter back in training mode when you get filter-thwarting spam.
  • Reply 8 of 8
    Are people suggesting that junk mail does not learn (when you tell it either something is junk, or not junk) unless you are specifically in training mode? That seems like it couldn't possibly be the case.



    I did training mode at first for a few weeks, and when it seemed good enough I switched it so that spam was automatically put into my junk mail folder for me. As I said before, this works very well. It gets most of my spam (probably 95%) with hardly any false positives.



    My problem is just that there are a few addresses that *always* get flagged as spam, even though I have the mail.app preference 'The following types of messages are exempt from junk mail filtering' set to exempt messages where 'Sender of message is in my Address Book', and the addresses that get falsely identified as spam are in fact in my Address Book.



    I'm just curious if this is some sort of known problem. I can't believe I have to wipe everything and reinstall just to fix this. But on the other hand, it drives me nuts! I really doubt that setting mail back into training mode is necessary. Can anyone else confirm that?



    Thanks.
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