4.3   Setting Up a Spam Filtering Drone

As described in the Correct All Mistakes section, you need to tell SpamSieve about messages that it misclassified so that it can learn from them. Also, the sooner you correct SpamSieve the better. This presents a problem if you’re going to be away from your Mac for a while, e.g. if you’re on a trip and using your iPhone/iPad or Web mail. With the normal setup, you can leave SpamSieve running on your Mac at home, and it will clean the spam out of your inbox, but aside from remote-controlling your Mac there’s no way to train SpamSieve.

The drone setup lets you run SpamSieve on one Mac and train it from other Macs, PCs, or iPhones. This setup requires Apple Mail, MailMate, or Microsoft Outlook 2011.

Here’s an outline of how it works:

• All the computers check the same IMAP, iCloud, or Exchange account.

• One Mac (the drone) downloads all the messages and filters them with SpamSieve. The other computers (your notebook Mac, your PC at work, your iPhone, etc.) are not running SpamSieve, yet they get a spam-free inbox. If you’re using an iPhone, you may want to turn off push e-mail so that the phone doesn’t notify you about new messages that would be put into the spam mailbox, anyway.

• If you’re sitting at the drone, you can train it normally using the Train as Good/Spam menu commands.

• If you’re at one of the other computers, you can train it remotely:

  • If a spam message gets through, move it to the special TrainSpam mailbox to train the drone. Periodically, the drone will train the messages in this mailbox as spam and then move them to the spam mailbox. (Do not delete uncaught spam messages until after this has occurred.)
  • If a good message ends up in the spam mailbox, move it to the special TrainGood mailbox to train the drone. Periodically, the drone will train the messages in this mailbox as good and then move them to the inbox.

  You can also train it from an iPhone, as described in the iPhone Spam Filtering section.

• The Apple Mail drone checks the Train mailboxes whenever a new message arrives in the inbox. This can even work when your Mac is asleep, if you are Filtering Spam During Power Nap. The MailMate and Outlook drones check the Train mailboxes periodically, according to a schedule that you set. The Mac needs to be logged into your account, although you can also use other accounts via Fast User Switching.

To set up the spam filtering drone:

1. Make sure that all the computers are set to connect to your mail account via IMAP, iCloud, or Exchange.

2. Create two additional mailboxes in each mail account: TrainGood and TrainSpam. (There should not be spaces in the names.)

   Note: If you don’t mind (or in fact prefer) having all of your spam go to one account’s Junk mailbox, you can instead create a single pair of training mailboxes in that account. However, this may make it more cumbersome to move messages into the training mailboxes (e.g. from iOS or Webmail).

3. Continue following the instructions below for Apple Mail, MailMate, or Outlook.

• 4.3.1   Setting Up an Apple Mail Drone
• 4.3.2   Setting Up a MailMate Drone
• 4.3.3   Setting Up an Outlook Drone