Junk mail filter on .Mac

I use SpamSieve along with a .Mac account. In Mail, I have disabled the junk mail filter as you suggest. However, I do have the junk mail filter enabled in the .Mac webmail interface because I found that if I didn’t, I would have to wade through tons of junk whenever I used .Mac webmail.

However, because I’ve enabled the junk filter on .Mac webmail, there is now a “junk” folder in my Mail client again. This is a separate folder from the one that SpamSieve puts the spam it catches into.

So I have a few questions:

  1. Is it a problem to have these separate folders?

  2. Is there a way I can use SpamSieve to help train .Mac webmail’s junk filtering, which leaves a lot to be desired? If I drag a message from the Spam folder used by SpamSieve to the Junk folder in Mail (used by .Mac), would that identify the message as “spam” for .Mac?

No.

I don’t know, but I guess it’s worth a try.

Thanks for your response, Michael.

Two more questions. All of my mailboxes in my Mail client are stored on my .Mac account, including the folder I use for SpamSieve spam. I have named this folder “_Spam” so that it appears at the top of my mailbox list. But when I re-read the instructions you say it’s very important to call the folder “Spam” and nothing else. Is that true, or did I misread it?

This morning I noticed that when I mark a message as spam using SpamSieve, it is not going into the “_Spam” folder in my .Mac list of mailboxes that I designated in my SpamSieve rule.

Instead, when I manually mark the message as “spam”, it is being routed to an old folder in my “On my Mac” mailbox directory called “aSpam” that I used for spam previously. I can’t see how this is happening, since I have double-checked my SpamSieve rule and it is indeed set up to route spam to “_Spam”, not “aSpam”.

Note that the messages which SpamSieve automatically catches as spam are properly routed to the “_Spam” mailbox.

Thanks,
Chris

By default, SpamSieve thinks that the name of the mailbox is “Spam”; if you call it something else when it’s expecting “Spam”, there will be problems. This page explains how to use a different name.

The rule controls where incoming spam messages go. It has nothing to do with what happens when you use the “Train as Spam” command. In fact, some people prefer to have the trained spams go to a different mailbox (e.g. the trash) than the incoming spams.

You need to use the Change Settings command to tell SpamSieve the name of the mailbox that you want to use, and also that you don’t want to use a local spam mailbox.

Thanks for your response, Michael.

The “change settings” command is exactly what I needed.

I actually set it to move messages I mark as spam to the “Junk” mailbox in my .Mac IMAP mailboxes directory. I’m hoping that this will train .Mac to recognize those messages as spam, and intercept them before they even get to my client. I’m doing this because I want to reduce the amount of spam I see in my inbox when I use .Mac webmail.

Chris

Michael,

A thought occurred to me. What if I changed the rule in Mail and the settings to route spam directly into the .Mac IMAP “junk” mailbox - since what I am doing now is manually dragging messages from the SpamSieve “spam” folder to that .Mac junk mailbox in the hopes of training .Mac to better filter spam on the server side?

Any problems with that? Note that I would still have junk mail filtering turned off on my client, but the “junk” folder appears in my .Mac mailbox hierarchy because I have filtering turned on in .Mac webmail.

Finally, I read the instructions for changing the name of the Spam mailbox. It said “click on the Spam folder and change its name, and then the rule will update automatically”. However, in my case, there was no “Spam” folder in my mailbox hierarchy to change. When I set up SpamSieve I created a “_Spam” mailbox from scratch and then set up the rule. From your last reply here it seems that’s not advised.

But how would I “start over” so that I had a “Spam” mailbox to change to another name in the first place?

I don’t recommend that. With two spam filters putting messages into the same mailbox, it will be hard to properly correct them if a good message ends up there.

That’s OK. Just rename the one that you have.