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Junk Mail filters of the type used in Mail work by learning to weed out unwanted messages after prompting the user to initially identify which messages are junk and which are genuine. After a while, they get to know for themselves what’s what and can function pretty much on their own, but their behaviour can still be fine-tuned. Here’s our simple guide to keeping your inbox spam-free.
Step 1: Open Preferences
Launch Mail and choose File>Preferences to access the Preferences pane. Click Junk Mail and ensure the Enable junk mail filtering checkbox is ticked.
Step 2: Training mode
You’ll need to keep tabs on what Mail is identifying as Junk Mail. To do this, select the Mark as junk mail, but leave it in my Inbox button.
Step 3: Switch to auto
Once you’re sure you can trust the filter to accurately identify Junk Mail, select Move it to the Junk mailbox. This should now filter junk automatically.
Step 4: Action stations
To tweak the filter settings manually, or block messages from specific domains or senders, select Perform custom actions, and then hit Advanced.
Step 5: Conditions apply
A default set of Junk Mail conditions appear. Choose whether ‘all’ or ‘any’ of these apply, then click an Add (+) button to add your own conditions.
Step 6: On the menu
The first pop-up contains a list of an email’s possible attributes to target. If you want to identify messages from a certain sender as junk, select From.
Step 7: Call the operator
The middle pop-up contains operators such as Contains, Is equal to, Begins with etc. For our example, we’ll leave this option set to Contains.
Step 8: Enter text
Use the box on the right to enter specific text, such as the email address or domain of the sender you’re identifying as the source of junk messages.
Step 9: Select action
Use the lower panel to select the action to perform when the conditions are fulfilled. Here, every new message from this sender will be moved to Junk.
(Click on the image below to zoom in and view the annotations)
