Email > Spam > Mac OSX 10.2

Spam Filtering in Mac OSX 10.2

Mac Mail has its own built-in spam program. The more samples of Junk mail and legitimate email you have to train the spam filter the better it will work. To access Mac Mail Spam filters, Click on Mail and from the drop down menu select Junk Mail and then select Training.

Train Mac Mail to determine the difference between spam and legitimate email

Open Mac Mail. The emails that Mac Mail thinks are spam will be colored brown by default (unfortunately this does not show in screen shot because of the selection, required to show the Not Junk button). In the screen shot below, the Junk Mail filters believes that the email from My Music Inc is spam and has colored it accordingly. If the email was legitimate and had been wrongfully classified as spam, click the Not Junk button.

Alternatively, if you have email which is spam and Mac Mail has not marked it as such, Click the Junk button. Continue until all of your email is properly categorized.

Continue to retrain Mac Mail through false positives and negatives

No automatic process can substitute for personal judgment on whether any given message is spam or not. Inevitably, even carefully designed filters will have "false positives" (messages that the filter thinks look like spam, but aren't), and "false negatives" (messages that the filter thinks don't look like spam, but are).

For this reason, the method given here doesn't throw away suspicious mail without giving you a chance to read it but, rather, diverts it to a mailbox separate from your normal inbox called 'spam'. The idea is that you examine this mailbox at lower priority, with the expectation that the messages in it are almost certainly all junk.

False negatives will show up in your regular "in" basket. You can deal with this by periodically "re-training" Mac Mail.

When you feel comfortable that Mac Mail is classifying your email correctly go back into Junk Mail (Click Mail > Junk Mail) and check Automatic.

Now when you check your inbox, Mac Mail will have moved everything it believes is spam to a Junk folder. To deal with false negatives that are in your inbox simply click on the Junk button. Periodically check the spam mailbox to make sure legitimate email has not been misclassified and moved to your Junk folder. If it has, select it and click the Not Junk button.