Comments on: Taking Mail’s Junk Filter for Granted

By: ahmet sensoz

ahmet sensoz — Wed, 27 May 2009 08:37:57 +0000

This is something we Macintosh users totally agree!

By: Isabel

Isabel — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 20:48:33 +0000

I can’t add your rss feed to my reader, what could be the problem?

By: Lorie

Lorie — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 17:29:54 +0000

I’m having a problem with my junk mail filter lately. The mail I get from a couple of sites such as Costco continue to break thru the filter no matter HOW often I mark them as ‘junk’. Anyone know why?

By: Geo

Geo — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 15:35:07 +0000

Mac’s filter sucks. Lets way too much through. But it’s better than nothing.

One question. How can I filter mail on my iPhone?

By: Matt Simpson

Matt Simpson — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 11:05:05 +0000

I can't be the only one that thinks the spam filter in Apple Mail is a freaking joke, can I? I used to get false negatives every day before I finally got fed up and installed SpamSieve. I found that the Apple one was slower and required a lot more training, and even after all that training spam would still get through to my inbox. I get anywhere from 20 to 40 spam messages a day, similar to John Davis above, but if I see one get through SpamSieve to my inbox in a week then that's a bad week.

By: Honza

Honza — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 15:16:39 +0000

I never got much spam until some sicko windows luser got a worm in his inbox.

I tried Gmail recently, but I only sent 1 email from it as a test. When I logged in the next day there were 100′s of spam mails in the spam folder. So, it seems that Gmail give out your email address to anyone right? No thanks, I’ll stick with Yahoo.

By: John Davis

John Davis — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 01:59:09 +0000

I agree. The junk filter in mail is excellent. I regularly get 30/40 a day and only about once a week does something find its way through.

John Davis

By: Nick

Nick — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 22:49:19 +0000

One account I have in Mail.app never used to get spam at all. Now it does, although I’ve never posted the address anywhere on the web and only ever given it to family and friends. Oh, well, I suppose it only takes one Windows-using acquaintence to get infected, and the malware on their machine will vaccuum up any mail addresses stored on it …

To get to the point, I find the spam I’m currently getting is all image spam, and it goes right through Mail.app’s spam filter. Presumably, “latent semantic analysis” — the method Mail.app’s built-in filter uses — is not very good with image spam. Maybe a bayesian spam filter, like SpamSieve or Bogofilter, would do better. But I’m not sure I want to pay up for SpamSieve, and getting Bogofilter compiled and running on OS X sound a little hit-and-miss from what I’ve read. At the moment I’m using a manual filter to deal with image spam as described here:

http://www.tuaw.com/2006/08/04/a-mail-app-rule-for-catching-image-spam/

But that is a bit of a kludge and is going to result in false positives. It’s a nuisance. It seems Mail.app’s filter can’t cope with image spam, and that’s now so prevalent.

By: mic

mic — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 15:14:42 +0000

gmail and Yahoo! mail both have great spam filters–I read .Mac, gmail and Yahoo mail on my blackberry and get very little spam forwarded. But like Galley above, I get very little spam on my .Mac account–that’s because I don’t use it to buy stuff (except iTunes or the Apple store). Most of my spam goes to gmail or Yahoo (which I have had forever) and gets filtered out

By: Galley

Galley — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 14:21:31 +0000

Maybe I’m lucky, but I have yet to receive any spam on my .Mac account.