“I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that Mail’s Junk Mail filter, when properly configured, can be a reliable tool for keeping spam out of your In box. The bad news is that even if the Junk Mail filter is working as well as it possibly can, you may still see more spam than you would like. Luckily, other applications and techniques can make up for the Junk Mail filter’s deficiencies. You’ll be able to make better decisions about how to use (or supplement) the Junk Mail filter when you know what happens behind the scenes,” Joe Kissel writes for TidBITS.
“Mail’s Junk Mail filter has two modes: Training and Automatic. (You can also disable it entirely.) Exactly what happens in these two modes can confuse the uninitiated. In particular, many people wonder whether the filter continues to learn if you switch to the Automatic mode. (It does indeed, though Apple’s documentation obscures this fact.) Here are the details,” Kissel writes. “The ‘Message is junk mail’ condition sounds rather mysterious, but it means that, if true, Mail’s latent semantic analysis filter (discussed in the full article) has assigned the message a value beyond its arbitrary threshold for spam. You cannot modify this threshold, but if you later mark the message as ‘Not Junk,’ you decrease the probability that Mail will consider a similar message to be spam in the future.”
This is a must-read for users of Mac OS X Mail; it’ll help you filter the junk and understand what the heck is going on in Mail. Full article here.
What’s OSX?
*Smacks Donnie with a trout*
I love Mail’s filter. My company gets some 5000 junk mails a day to non-real recipients and they all go through me. With mail I get about 50-100 a day that make it through, and Ive only knowingly lost 5 real e-mails through the last 6 months. Entourage is horrible at this
Am I missing out on anything? I don’t get spam on my real address and have set my alt yahoo address to automatically delete spam, so I don’t get any there either. I still say, if spam is a problem, change your address (if possible). This proves one thing at least: big companies that take your money for subscriptions or services protect their email lists.
The rules:
Never post your real email address in a public forum;
Encrypt your email address in your web pages;
Never open an html email “online” from an unknown source.
Article states:
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“When a message arrives, Mail runs a built-in rule – a rule that does not appear in the Rules list. In order to minimize false positives, this special junk mail rule runs after all other rules. But it doesn’t run if one of your other rules includes the “Stop evaluating rules” action, and it applies only if a given message has not already been moved or deleted by some other rule.”
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Has anyony else noticed that Apples built in “News from Apple” rule has a “Stop Evaluating Rules” right in it?
Strange…
It has “Stop Evaluating Rules” because they assume if you have signed up for email from apple that you dont want it categorized as junk mail. if you do, chagne the rule
Jfly wrote:
“When a message arrives, Mail runs a built-in rule – a rule that does not appear in the Rules list. In order to minimize false positives, this special junk mail rule runs after all other rules. But it doesn’t run if one of your other rules includes the “Stop evaluating rules” action, and it applies only if a given message has not already been moved or deleted by some other rule.”
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Has anyony else noticed that Apples built in “News from Apple” rule has a “Stop Evaluating Rules” right in it?
I don’t think that the action described can be the case. I still have the “News from Apple” active and all my other rules, including Junk Mail, seem to be working perfectly.
What’s windows???
it really is great at weeding out junk mail. Too bad all the bugs arent out of it though, i seem to have to force quit it once every week to get it to run right. Hopefully itll be improved in Tiger.