Steve Dispensa tells a funny story at Kernel Mustard:

My Apple mail client has a built-in spam filter. I’m not sure how it works, but it does have to be trained. Anyway, that’s all I know about it.

It turns out that of all of the copious communications I receive from Microsoft, the ONLY thing that the spam filter catches – EVERY TIME – is the Microsoft Mactopia (Mac Business Unit) newsletter. I mark it as “not junk” every time. It refuses to learn.

(For what it’s worth, Mail.app is largely a piece of crap, with tons of un-Apple-like bugs. Don’t get me started.)

False positives are annoying. But my Mactopia newsletter turned up without problem in my Inbox this morning, so it doesn’t have to be this way.

Three ways to reduce false positives:

1. Keep your Address Book up to date. You can set the Junk Filter to let through messages from people whose email addresses are in your Address Book (Preferences > Junk Mail > Sender of mail is on my Address Book), but it only works well if all the addresses you value are in it. (Could this be Steve’s problem?)
2. Make sure that you always correct the Junk Filter if it incorrectly marks a message as Junk Mail by clicking the “Not Junk” in the Toolbar or hitting Command-Shift-J. This ongoing learning stops Junk Filter making the same mistake more than once.
3. If nothing else works, create a rule for email that Junk Filter keeps wrongly marking as spam. Add the “Stop evaluating rules” action to the rule and Junk Filter will ignore the email.

These excellent tips are taken (shamelessly) from Joe Kissell’s “Take Control of Spam with Apple Mail” ebook. Buy it .

It makes an first-rate companion to his equally-useful Take Control of Apple Mail in Tiger ebook. Or save money and buy them both .

Similar Posts:

• How Apple Mail’s Junk Filter works
• Mail.app and SpamAssassin in spam-catching harmony
• Image spam: Spam gets more canny
• How Bayesian spam filtering works
• Mail.app’s Junk Filter is not like the others

Tags: Address Book, False positives, junk filter, mail.app, microsoft, Spam Filter

This entry was posted on Friday, 3rd February, 2006 at 12:29 am and is filed under Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.