The Anti-Spam Toolkit

Spam, the junk that now makes up more than 80 percent of email, is a problem that’s only getting worse. Luckily, you, along with Mail’s advanced spam filters, can make it better—at least for your email accounts.

Using the Junk Mail Filter

You’ll see the effects of Mail’s spam filter the first time you check your mail: A certain swath of message titles appears in brown. These are the messages that Mail considers junk.

Note

Out of the box, Mail doesn’t apply its spam-targeting features to people whose addresses are in your Contacts, to people you’ve emailed recently, or to messages sent to you by name rather than just by email address. You can adjust these settings in the Mail→Preferences→Junk Mail tab.

During your first couple of weeks with Mail, your job is to supervise Mail’s work. That is, if you get spam that Mail misses, click the message, and then click the Junk button on the toolbar. On the other hand, if Mail flags legitimate mail as spam, slap it gently on the wrist by clicking the Not Junk button. Over time, Mail gets better and better at filtering your mail.

The trouble with this so-called Training mode is that you’re still left with the task of trashing the spam yourself, saving you no time whatsoever.

GEM IN THE ROUGH: When You Want to be Nudged About Incoming Mail

Mountain Lion’s Notification Center consolidates all the different programs and features that might want your attention—Mail, Reminders, Twitter, Facebook, software updates, and so on—into a single tidy list. See Chapter 16 for the full details.

But if a little Notification Center alert bubble appeared on your screen every time any new Mail message came in, you’d go quietly mad. Fortunately, a new Mail setting lets you tell Mail, “Don’t disturb me unless it’s really important. Like if it’s from my accountant.”

Here’s how to set up this useful filter. Choose Mail→Preferences→General. See the “New message notifications” pop-up menu?

Here, you can choose Inbox only (all incoming messages trigger alert bubbles); VIPs (perhaps the most useful option—only messages from these essential people produce alerts); Contacts (messages from anyone in your address book trigger alerts—just not messages from strangers); or All Mailboxes (every single incoming message flags you).

You can also choose the name of a smart mailbox, if you’ve created one. That’s a pretty potent feature. It means you can set up incoming messages to alert you only if they match whatever criteria your smart mailbox uses. For example, you might not want to be disturbed except when a message comes from one of your best friends and it has an attachment and it mentions “money I owe you.”

You may have noticed, by the way, that there’s no option here for “Don’t show me Mail message bubbles at all.” That’s because you do that in System Preferences.

Open System Preferences→Notifications, click Mail, and turn off Show in Notification Center. Now you’ll be left in peace when new mail arrives, no matter who it’s from.

Once Mail has perfected its filtering skills to your satisfaction, though, open Mail’s preferences, click Junk Mail, and then click “Move it to the Junk mailbox.” From now on, Mail automatically files what it deems junk into a Junk mailbox, where it’s much easier to scan and delete the messages en masse.

Tip

Don’t miss the “Trust Junk Mail headers” option in the Junk Mail pane of the Preferences window. If you turn on that checkbox, then Mail takes your Internet provider’s word that certain messages are spam, giving you a double layer of spam protection.

More Anti-Spam Tips

The Junk filter goes a long way toward cleaning out the spam from your mail collection—but it doesn’t catch everything. If you’re overrun by spam, here are some other steps you can take:

  • Rules. Set up some message rules, as described on the preceding pages, that autoflag as spam messages that have subject lines containing trigger words like “Viagra,” “Herbal,” “Mortgage,” “Refinance,” “Enlarge,” “Your”—you get the idea.

  • Create a private account. If you’re overrun by spam, consider sacrificing your current address, using it for the public areas of the Internet, like chat rooms, online shopping, Web site and software registration, and newsgroup posting. Reserve a separate email account for person-to-person email.

    Spammers use automated software robots that scour every public Internet message and Web page, recording email addresses they find. (In fact, that’s probably how they got your address in the first place.)

    Using this technique, at least you’re now restricting the junk mail to a secondary mail account.

    TROUBLESHOOTING MOMENT: Rebuilding Your Mail Databases

    Mail keeps your messages in your Home→Library→Mail folder. (Your Library folder is usually invisible, but you can jump to it by pressing Option as you choose Go→Library in the Finder.)

    Over time, as you add and delete hundreds of messages from these database files, some digital sawdust gets left behind, resulting in general Mail sluggishness. You also wind up with massive message files hidden on your hard drive, which can consume hundreds of megabytes of disk space. That’s a particular bummer if you like to copy your message databases to your laptop when you go on a trip.

    Fortunately, it’s easy enough to rebuild the message databases. Doing so cleanses, repairs, and purges your message files. As a result, you wind up with a much more compact and healthy database.

    To rebuild a mailbox, highlight it in the mailboxes column in Mail. (Highlight several by ⌘-clicking, if you like.) Then choose Mailbox→Rebuild. OS X takes several minutes (or hours, depending on the size of your mailboxes) to repair and compact your database—but if you’re experiencing Mail weirdness or slowness, it’s well worth the sacrifice.

  • For goodness’ sake, don’t order anything sold by the spammers. If only one person in 500,000 does so, the spammer makes money.

..................Content has been hidden....................

You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.
Reset
18.191.253.62