Forums | MacLife

Heh, well, I have six email addresses... plus my aliases.  I've been trying to phase this one out for a while, but it still gets used sometimes.

JunkMatcher is pretty good.   Run it once to get it going.   That's it.   

Gmail is definitely very good at filtering.

i concur. i've been getting much more email in the last few weeks than i am willing to accept.

google just about has me convinced to switch over to them completely, leaving .Mac in the dust.

In the past month i've noticed a huge spike in the amount of spam i get on a daily basis on all e-mail accounts besides my the server i pay for with my own domain.

I have 8 email accounts I use, and for 3 of those accounts I have close to 20 or so aliases.

all but 3 of those accounts are public (non public are my private email, university email, and a "special" support email).
The other 5 are all various public email addresses (2 personal emails made public, 1 sales email, and 2 public support emails)

now, how I keep my spam under control.... I don't.

My university email is used strictly for school related business, and it gets tons of email every day because my school gives me tons every day.
The private email isn't published anywhere, and is only given out to a few people and to people I have official business with (caltsar@domain.com just isn't quite as official as something like f.lastname@domain.com), plus I have any message sent to that address come up on growl as an "emergency" item.
The special support email is just an unclogged way for anyone I do work for to get a hold of me if there any issues.

None of these private addresses get any junk mail.  My public addresses on the other hand get tons of it.  Perhaps 300 to 800 messages a day between them.  This is caused by all the multiple copies of spam that get sent to them through the aliases, and the fact that I've given up and just posted these emails as straight links (Spam bots love me!).  However, only 20-30 of these emails see my inbox (excluding legitimate messages), and all but 1 or 2 are immediatly filtered into Mail's junk box.  I do it like this:

First, on the two servers I have, SpamAssassin is enabled (gmail, and the university have their own system that I have no control over), and I have it set to send anything with more than 7 points to blackhole@rollinit.com (a catchall email account used for monitoring). it's a very simple filter that catches abour 90% of the spam at the server and has never flagged a message wrong.  Apple's Mail seems to catch the rest by following its own rules and also looking at the spam assassin flag that's put into the email headers (seems to generally put them in the junk box if it's 4.5 points or higher).  This tends to take care of the rest and almost never filters wrong.

Now, unfortunately, .mac (or iTools) doesn't have that kind of control over email and junk filtering.  the best you can do is play with Mail's rules until it works.  Go to the View menu and select Message -> Long headers.  Look for patterns and any spam filter flags you can find.  Anything that you can find to help fine tune your rules should help you get rid of the junk mail problem almost entirely.

I started getting spam for the first time at my .mac address just a couple of weeks ago too.
The address only goes out to friends, family and a few work people.
It's always for undervalued stocks.
I get a couple a day and I mark them all, I would have though mail's "learning" filter would have "learnt" them by now considering the content is almost exaclty the same each time.
Gmail definitely has better spam filtering.

titok16 wrote:

I have 800 email addresses and over 10 intranets
tito

And not even the spammers want to talk to you.
How sad.

mine are for undervalued spam as well. is there any way to contact apple about this "harvesting" you speak of?

I migrated my motly collection of Hotmail, Yahoo, Spymac and some others all over to a collection of addresses on Gmail and OwnMail. Gmail has truely excellent spam filtering and Ownmail is very good.
The interesting thing is that with those mail servers even my most public addesses get no more spam than my most private.

Mail's junk filter works really well for me. It has caught most of my spam for the past few months now, with the occasional 1 or 2 slipping through every now and then.

mo' ron wrote:

Mail's junk filter works really well for me. It has caught most of my spam for the past few months now, with the occasional 1 or 2 slipping through every now and then.

Mine has caught a total of zero spam for approximately 1 year now. It is near useless.

I have a Yahoo account that I use for nothing but a spam account (as well as another IM service to have in Adium). My real account is on Gmail, and I have Mail's filter and the free JunkMatcher as an add-on. When spam does get through (quite rare), I mark it as spam locally and report it to Gmail. This works pretty well for me.