If you ever stop blogging for a bit due to an insane period in your Real Life, you will notice that eventually collections of interesting things begin to pile up in your inbox.

Over the last little while, three helpful on-line tutorials have appeared which offer Mail.app users extra tips on smart mailboxes, spam protection and setting up IMAP accounts.

Merlin Mann at 43Folders has written up some good tips on smart mailboxes , how to make them and how to use them to make yourself more productive. He includes screenshots of some useful smart mailbox setups which are ripe for copying or for sparking off your own thinking about how smart mailboxes could make your life easier.

Macinstruct writer Matthew Cone explains how Mail.app users can better protect themselves from spam by outlining the main methods for catching spam, how Apple Mail’s “latent semantic analysis” spam filter works and how to make the best use of it. Finally, the explains how to set up SpamSieve for those who need extra Bayesian protection.

Dan Rubin has discovered that “a surprisingly large number of people don’t know all the steps involved in properly configuring an IMAP account in Apple’s Mail.app.” He plugs the gap with a “mini-tutorial” on get it right, including Mail.app’s mysterious ” Use this mailbox for…” option which trips a lot of people up.mail.app, apple mail, productivity, smart mailboxes, spam, IMAP, junk mail, email

Alexander Obenauer tells one of those seductive stories which has come up once or twice before and which you wish could be true for everyone.

He says,

I was playing with the customize toolbar feature in Mail.app when I saw a button labelled “Bounce”. After using the bounce feature on the tens of spam I get daily for 3 days, my inbox is spam free. Incredible.

An email given the bounce treatment in Mail.app gets returned to the sender as if it were undeliverable. And, so the theory goes, sees your email address removed from the spammer’s database.

Rather than repeat what I suggested last time, Ray (in the comments to Alexander’s post) puts the other side:

I thought about this technique about five years ago. Here are my conclusions: Not all spammers remove you from their list if they receive a bounce message. Most spam uses a bogus From address, so your bounce will most likely end up in someone else’s inbox.

I like a good silver bullet. This is far from it.

So, to bounce or not to bounce?

Apple’s own tech note on bouncing draws a distinction between bouncing messages from commercial mass mailings (useful) and bouncing spam (not so useful). Maybe it’s not a simple “yes” or “no” answer. mail.app, apple mail, bouncing, spam, mass mailing, email, junk mail

Michael Tsai has released an updated version of his very fine spam-catching app.

The new version (2.4.4) brings general improvements in spam detection and accuracy, especially with HTML emails and blank messages. It’s smarter about emails without subject lines too.

It also features a couple of tweaks just for Mail.app users. The “Train as Good” command now moves messages out of submailboxes in the Junk mailbox, and the plugin installer is more robust in the face of messed-up folder permissions.

SpamSieve now also quits when your email client quits, politely freeing up space in your Dock.

You can read the full changelog on Michael’s site where you can also get the updated version . SpamSieve is shareware (USD 25).spam, apple mail, Mail.app, junk mail, apple mail plugins