Spam, the junk that now makes up more than 80 percent of email, is a problem that’s only getting worse. Luckily, you, along with Mail’s advanced spam filters, can make it better—at least for your email accounts.
You’ll see the effects of Mail’s spam filter the first time you check your mail: Certain message titles appear in brown. These are the messages that Mail considers junk.
Out of the box, Mail doesn’t apply its spam-targeting features to people whose addresses are in your Contacts, to people you’ve emailed recently, or to messages sent to you by name rather than just by email address. You can adjust these settings in the Mail→Preferences→Junk Mail tab.
During your first couple of weeks with Mail, your job is to supervise Mail’s work. That is, if you get spam that Mail misses, click the message and then click the Junk button on the toolbar. On the other hand, if Mail flags legitimate mail as spam, slap it gently on the wrist by clicking the Not Junk button. Over time, Mail gets better and better at filtering your mail.
The trouble with this so-called Training mode is that you’re still left with the task of trashing the spam yourself, saving you no time whatsoever.
Once Mail has perfected its filtering skills to your satisfaction, though, open Mail’s preferences, click Junk Mail, and then click “Move it to the Junk mailbox.” From now on, Mail automatically files what it deems junk into a Junk mailbox, where it’s much easier to scan and delete the messages en masse.
The Junk filter goes a long way toward cleaning out the spam from your mail collection—but it doesn’t catch everything. If you’re overrun by spam, here are some other steps you can take:
Rules. Set up some message rules, as described on the preceding pages, that autoflag as spam messages that have subject lines containing trigger words like “Viagra,” “Herbal,” “Mortgage,” “Refinance,” “Enlarge,” “Your”—you get the idea.
Create a private account. If you’re overrun by spam, consider sacrificing your current address, using it for the public areas of the Internet, like chat rooms, online shopping, website and software registration, and newsgroup posting. Open a new, a separate email account for person-to-person email.
Spammers use automated software robots that scour every public Internet message and web page, recording email addresses they find. (In fact, that’s probably how they got your address in the first place.)
Using this technique, at least you’re now restricting the junk mail to a secondary mail account.
For goodness’ sake, don’t order anything sold by the spammers. If only one person in 500,000 does so, the spammer makes money.