8. Quarantine Repeat Offenders with Rules
You can improve Mail’s spam filtering with custom-built rules. For instance, you might send any messages that contain the word “mortgage” in the subject to the Junk folder. (Probably a bad idea if you’re actually shopping for a mortgage.) Before SpamSieve, our most effective spam rule targeted messages whose contents contained HTML and whose senders were not listed in our Address Book. Examine the spam you see most frequently, and experiment for the best results. Get started by opening Preferences in Mail and clicking the Rules tab.
A well-built rule can catch persistent spam that Mail’s filter misses.
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9. Report Repeat Offenders
Believe it or not, spamming is illegal, at least in the United States. We’re not sure how much good it does, but we forward repeat offenders or obvious fraud attempts to the Federal Trade Commission. The address to remember is spam@uce.gov. We figure if it increases the chances that a spammer will be caught and shut down - even by a little bit - it’s worth the time it takes to report them.
Yahoo’s spam filter was even more aggressive than Gmail’s in our testing, trapping a higher number of good messages.
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