Using Junk Mail Filtering

To deal with the inevitable flood of junk email every email account receives, the Mail program includes built-in junk mail filtering. To use Mail's junk mail filtering, you need to turn it on, tell Mail what to do with junk mail, and tell Mail how to identify junk mail.

By default, Mail's junk mail filter is turned on, but here's how you can turn it off or on and modify how the filter behaves:

After you've configured Mail's junk filter, Mail can identify most junk mail, but some junk mail will still slip past. When you find junk mail that Mail's filters have missed, you can manually label the message as junk, which helps "train" Mail to recognize similar junk email in the future.

When Mail recognizes a junk mail message, it displays that message in a different color. To identify junk mail manually (or remove an incorrect junk mail label from a valid message), do the following:

After you've identified junk mail, you can delete junk messages manually by doing the following:

If you configured Mail to route suspected junk messages to a Junk mailbox folder automatically, you should browse through this Junk mailbox folder periodically to look for any valid messages mistakenly identified as junk by Mail's filters. When you're sure the Junk mailbox folder only contains useless messages, delete your Junk mailbox folder by selecting MailboxErase Junk Mail.