LIst of secure senders

Many spam filter programs has a facility named “Secure senders” or something like that. With this feature, you can list your friends who never write spams. Messages from them will then never be filtered away by the spam filter. Can this be done with Spamsieve? I was thinking maybe I could use it with some special Mac OS X mail rule. If I specify a Mac OS X mail rule, first, before I transfer eveything to the spam folder, and this rule than lists these secure senders, and then says “stop applying rules”. Then mail from these friends will never be moved to the spam folder, (and never be altered by any of my other rules) so that I am sure I never miss mail from these friends.

SpamSieve automatically whitelists messages from people who have only sent you non-spam messages. If you want to be sure it knows that a friend is “safe,” you can train a message from that person as good or put them in your Contacts.

Safe/Secure Senders

What will be the effect of the solution I used, to put in Apple Mail, a rule before the rule to move everything to the spam folder, and this rule checks if the senders are people I trust, and then stops applying rules, and thus will never apply the rule to move everything to the spam folder.

That was interesting. This means that I have to be very diligent in making the “Train as spam” command for every spam message I get, otherwise SpamSieve will whitelist every future message from that sender, even very spammy messages!

You can do that, and it will do what you say, but I don’t recommend it because:

  • It will be more work to update the rule than to use SpamSieve for this.
  • SpamSieve will not be able to see those good messages, so it won’t be able to learn from their contents to help filter other messages that are not trusted by your rule.

Yes, you need to correct all the mistakes (unless you turn off the auto-training feature, which I do not recommend). In practice, most of the spams will be caught automatically, so there are not many messages to train.