Does Apple Mail’s ‘Move to Junk’ tell the Mail Server the mail is Spam?
My email is hosted with Fastmail, which uses machine learning to train the server as to what I think is spam in addition to any built-in spam filters.
In their email Web GUI, I have a “mark as spam” button the moves email to the spam folder and also tell the machine learning “engine” that I think the email is spam . That way it can mark similar messages as spam in the future.
However, I usually use Apple Mail as my mail client. When I use the “Move to Junk” feature, does my Apple Mail client communicate with the Fastmail server so that it knows to consider that email as spam for future email filtering?
Or is the feature 100% local so perhaps it “teaches” Apple mail to consider that kind of email as spam for the purpose of mail filtering?
I’m pretty certain that the marking an email as spam in the Mail client is local only.
Check out this article for Fastmail’s suggested method of training their Spam filter. Prior to moving to Fastmail I was using a few methods, including running SpamAssassin on my always on desktop machine, and had created “myham” and “myspam” folders which I subsequently used for training Fastmail.
That’s what I thought. I was hoping to avoid creating an second “Spam” folder, but it looks like it’s either that or use the Web interface instead of Apple mail. I’ll create a “Spam Trainer” folder or some such name, and see if I can get ( I think I can ) configure Apple mails “Move to Junk” to put emails there. That will create harmony between the client and the server
I noted that the Spam folder itself isn’t for training the Spam folder, which I guess makes sense in case it gets a false positive. I’ll think of it as a “possible Spam” folder going forward.
