Mail's Spam filter is a nice first-level defense. If you look at the Junk filter in the Rules preferences, you see that address book entries and previous recipients are excluded from being marked as Junk. That means that, while not blacklisting them, all other addresses are suspect, and they are then subject to whatever content (e.g. Bayesian filter) filter Mail performs. Mail's Spam filter isn't perfect, and some of that depends on the individual determining what is junk. I find that my wife, for instance, still gets far more Spam than I do, although we use the same basic criteria. This was true when we just used Mail filtering; and is still true since I've purchased SpamSieve. It seems I have a better idea as what to train the filter than my wife does, but I couldn't specify even the most trivial example of why it is different. The only thing I can figure is that she is LESS selective about what is spam than I am. But that's only a clue.
If you have a lot of Spam, and/or you demand that you get the absolute minimum Spam and false positives, you should use a third-party solution such as SpamSieve or SpamAssassin, and/or use an ISP-level filtering (which may also include SpamAssassin or others). If you're a developer, you might want to know, in more detail, how Mail filters Spam. But if you're someone who just wants to reduce Spam, use the suggestions I've made, and please take into account that you are an individual who has trained your Spam/Junk account, and who had, originally, made some questionable choices about who, how, and when sends you email. If you haven't already thought of it, you might have a dummy email address (there are, of course, many free addresses available) when you subscribe to various commercial deals, and use one very restricted account to correspond with friends, colleagues, and family (and never add ANY commercial (including Social Networking) sites or addresses to that account. I have more than 10 accounts, and can shut any one down if it suddenly generates more spam than desired. In a certain sense, I'm not quite sure why Spammers choose to continue - most folks can filter more than 90% of Spam and choose other delivery methods (e.g. FaceBook), so that they're locked out of most interaction. I suppose the few responses from millions of messages sent are still valuable. john On Jul 10, 2010, at 12:00 PM, [email protected] wrote: From: Macs R We <[email protected]> Date: July 9, 2010 3:17:37 PM PDT To: xtalk Talk <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Flagging email as "Junk" On Jul 9, 2010, at 11:12 AM, Vince LaMonica wrote: > That is correct. Any good junk/spam filtering software ignores the from > address, as there is nothing in that field that is useful for accurate > spam filtering. In fact, any software that *does* use that address will > actually increase the amount of false positives since many spammers use > your own address I understand why one would not want a filter to automatically blacklist sender addresses, but that's no reason why it should not be willing to manually blacklist them. Heaven knows, I get enough repetitive crap from Song Lile, Robert Mueller, Ban Ki-Moon, and Western Union, and Mail diagnoses only a fraction of these. -- Macs R We -- Personal Macintosh Service and Support in the Wickenburg and far Northwest Valley Areas. http://macsrwe.com
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