Handling Junk Mail the correct way

Tech Support
1

How does everyone handle junk mail? I have an iCloud account and several other accounts, but the iCloud account is the only one suffering from a bulk of junk mail.

I have read somewhere, years ago, that it’s wise not to open the junk mail, but just send it directly to the junk mailbox. As a consequence of that wisdom, I have a large bulk of junk mail in my in junk mail box, all marked as unread. I go in there often to see if I miss any important emails that were sent there by accident.

Am I wrong? Is it better to just delete it as it comes in?

2

I use Fastmail with Apple Mail as my client. Any mail not automatically marked as Spam is moved to a folder that Fastmail watches and learns as Spam. Any mail that is mistakenly marked as Spam is similarly moved to a folder that Fastmail watches and learns to not be Spam.

Occasionally, I use the Fastmail client or web interface and manually mark emails as Spam or not Spam as needed.

All of the above trains Fastmail’s Spam filtering engine.

I am not sure if iCloud has Spam filtering/training. If it does, I’m not sure how to train it but perhaps others here have that info.

Also, I have all mail clients set up to not load remote images and to not send read receipts. This provides some safety if I happen to open an email before I can mark it as Spam.

Every so often, I go in and permanently delete messages in the Spam folder.

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3

Thanks. iCloud does learn from manual spam filtering, so much I’m sure of. But I’m just not sure if that’s the case if one removes all the spam from the spam mailbox in iCloud.

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4

If you go into Mail > Preferences > Accounts, you can set a behaviour for that mailbox.

In my case, I have the rule set to delete junk messages after one month.

Unfortunately, you have to do this separately for each account.

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5

I use mail rules to sort into a spam folder. I look at it daily when I process the good email, pull out the false spam stuff and then delete the rest. I cannot delete it automatically as I get far too many good messages flagged as spam due to my subject matter. I can’t white list all senders because I am the public face of the Sheep Registry and so get calls and emails from strangers.

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6

I use gmail and much of what I consider spam is automatically deleted by rules I created. And Google will normally flag as spam a handful of other messages/week. I review my junk mail before deleting, but this usually does not require me to open it.

But my email is not set to automatically display remote images, so opening a message does not download tracking pixels, etc. when I do open a questionable message.

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