3.1.4   Spam Message Colors

SpamSieve sets the colors of spam messages to reflect how spammy it thinks they are. The most spammy messages are colored Blue. Less spammy messages are colored Gray, Purple, Red, Orange, or Yellow (in that order); good messages are left uncolored. The Change Settings command lets you enable or disable spam message coloring.

If you tell Mail to sort the Spam mailbox by color, the most spammy messages will be at the top, and the least spammy ones at the bottom. Thus, if you are skimming the Spam mailbox for false positives, you should spend more time examining the messages at the bottom.

You can also use rules in Mail to file messages into different mailboxes (or otherwise process them differently) based on how spammy they are.

• To move all spam messages to a single mailbox, create a single rule named SpamSieve, as shown here:

  

• To separate spam messages by color (spamminess), you should instead create two or more rules. The first rule should be named SpamSieve [Score]. As above, you probably want the conditions to be Message Type is Mail (or Every Message if you have Mac OS X 10.4). When this rule is applied, SpamSieve will calculate the spam score of the message and set its color accordingly. The actions of the [Score] rule will be ignored.

  Below the [Score] rule you can create one or more rules that process messages based on their color. Each of these rules should have a name that starts with SpamSieve, followed by one or more color names in square brackets. Again, the rule conditions should be Every Message. For example, to make a rule that matches the most spammy Blue and Gray messages, you would name it SpamSieve [Blue][Gray] (or SpamSieve [Gray][Blue]). As a shorthand for listing all of the colors, you can simply write [Spam]. To match non-spam messages you can write [White]. You can include additional descriptive text after the brackets to remind you of what the rule does.

  Example: To move blocklisted messages to the trash and other spam messages to the Spam mailbox, you would need three rules:

  1. SpamSieve [Score] (calculates the spam score/color) / Message Type is Mail / Move Message to mailbox Spam
  2. SpamSieve [Blue] (move very spammy messages to the trash ) / Message Type is Mail / Move Message to mailbox Trash
  3. SpamSieve [Spam] (move the remaining spam messages) / Message Type is Mail / Move Message to mailbox Trash