I usually get a few pieces of junk mail in my “Junk” mail folder every morning. Today I found 52 in Junk. I cleaned them out, and a couple of hours halter I found 26 more. All obviously junk. Seems like Apple’s junk mail filters have failed or been turned off. I haven’t seen that before. Maybe the engineers are off for a Christmas vacation!
I wonder if anyone else is seeing this - or maybe I am just unlucky.
David
I’m confused. If junk mail is ending up in the Junk mail folder, doesn’t that indicate mail filtering is actually working? The fact that more spam gets sent, does not mean junk filtering isn’t working.
Yes, sure, it is being filtered at my end. But it never used to show up at all before. I know from experience that Apple deletes a lot of mail before sending it on. That doesn’t seem to be happening now.
Having experienced vital email being lost to server-level junk filtering, I want server-side filtering to happen only for super-obvious spam (I.e. email from known spambots). Suspicious email should be handled at the user-level with suspicious email sent to quarentine (I.e. the Junk mailbox). I spend a minute or two checking it, and, on most days, erase it all. However, a few days ago, email from Tidbits Talk was starting being sent there. Because it was only quarentined, I was able to recover and, hopefully, train the user-end junk filter not to do that.
I just wish that Apple had better (“smarter”) algorithms to identify obvious spam and dishonest emails. I do business with a Wine store in California and Apple started blocking all their emails (it never showed up in my mail - in the inbox or in Junk). I told them to switch to my Gmail account - no problem. Then Apple resumed sending them after about six months. Most of the time the email in the Junk folder really is junk - a few times legit email shows up there and I move it out. As has been discussed here in detail, Apple doesn’t pay any attention to what I do at my end - so I can’t “train” it to accept the legit email. I just checked and I have 15 more emails in Junk. It is unusual for there to be more than five or six a day for me. So, something has changed. And of course it is better to pass junk to me so I can review it than the “invisible deletes” that can happen.
You can manage iCloud spam filters at the server level rather than local:
I think I have the best of both worlds.
I use another ISP to handle email. They run email through SpamAssassin before it is passed along to me through IMAP. Until I switched back to Apple Mail recently and restored SpamSieve to my workflow, I would only see those emails if I went up through the web interface and explicitly looked at them.
Now, in Mail, I see the server-side Junk folder as well as a separate, local Junk Inbox. Once I figured out why I have two Junk folders, I check the server folder once a day (because it’s about 100 percent certain that those messages are indeed spam). Of course, the SpamSieve local folder is currently 98.5% correct as well…
I like this setup because it keeps the spam messages to a manageable level, and I can thus scan them very quickly to catch the very occasional good message.
To be perfectly honest, the most likely reason for your spam level to increase over the short term is that your email address suddenly got added to a significant number of spammers’ lists. This can happen when a new list starts circulating or a site you thought you could trust sold your email.
I have this happen regularly. I’ll go for a few weeks with a steady amount of spam showing up, then suddenly my level will double or triple for a few days. Frequently, it’s a flood from a single source, identifiable by them having the same sender display name and subject line. But sometimes it’s just a general increase that slowly peters out.
It can also be the case of simply a new spam farm hitting the net, temporarily increasing everyone’s spam. Usually, this kind of flood thins out after a few days as the source gets added to blacklists, which stops the messages from being forwarded through intermediate servers.
The thing to remember is that few spammers send out a constant flood of spam over any lengthy period. They usually send in bursts, for a number of reasons, but the primary one being that the more spam messages that get sent out from a particular server, the greater the odds of that server getting blacklisted. So they send out smaller batches over a period of several hours or a few days in an attempt to avoid triggering automated blacklists. Then they queue up the next list of recipients or the next batch of messages to go out a few days later.
Because of this, you should expect your filtered spam to vary over time. If it’s rock-solid stable, you’re in luck, because it means your email address isn’t on any of the high-circulation lists—yet. Eventually it will end up on one, though, and your spam will increase in the short term.
I just wish that Apple had better (“smarter”) algorithms to identify obvious spam and dishonest emails. I do business with a Wine store in California and Apple started blocking all their emails (it never showed up in my mail - in the inbox or in Junk). I told them to switch to my Gmail account - no problem. Then Apple resumed sending them after about six months.
This happens in share hosting when a range of IP addresses gets blacklisted because somebody in that shared server is spamming. Everybody within that shared server gets blacklisted. Maybe that Wine store hosted his domain in a shared hosting plan. It resolves by itself after a period of time, that can be days, weeks or months depending on how many complaints are filed.
Most of the time the email in the Junk folder really is junk - a few times legit email shows up there and I move it out. As has been discussed here in detail, Apple doesn’t pay any attention to what I do at my end - so I can’t “train” it to accept the legit email. I just checked and I have 15 more emails in Junk. It is unusual for there to be more than five or six a day for me. So, something has changed. And of course it is better to pass junk to me so I can review it than the “invisible deletes” that can happen.
Take into consideration that this time of the year, Christmas and New Year, a lot more spam is send out.
JC
As one poster suggested, this would resolve itself. This morning I am back to normal volume in the Junk folder (i.e., 4 emails). Never any problems with a lot of junk showing up with my valid email - it was just the volume in the Junk folder that I wondered about.
(Flagging email as junk in the iCloud version of mail doesn’t help since these are already flagged as junk.)
Thanks for the comments,
David
As long as you’re not finding your InBox flooded with spam or Good Mail in your Spam folder, you’re in good shape. Good spam filters need time to learn what’s spam. What’s bad news is when good mail starts showing up in the Spam filter or never showing up at all. That’s why it’s good to check your spam filter once in a while.
Speaking of learning (and in the context of Apple Intelligence), do we have any indication that iCloud mail actually learns from junk mail being rerouted to inbox or vice-versa?
I don’t know, and you have to be careful about spam filters are designed. I’m sure I’m not the only one who deletes much of the incoming mail that I want to receive after reading it. If the spam filter assumes I deleted because it’s spam, it may start blocking mail I want to receive. I think that was behind many of the problems I had from my former email server.
Can you explain how to get Mail to display the server-side Junk folder, please?
Will, I think it’s because my ISP includes one on the server. When I go through the Web interface to get messages, there’s a structure that includes a folder named “Junk”…and messages that get filtered at the server level are deposited in that directory. When I view the account in Mail using IMAP, it shows the directory structure of each account, which includes the Junk folder on the server.
The confusion comes in because SpamSieve uses a local “Junk” mailbox as well.
I think it’s a matter of how your ISP handles mail filtering on your server. If you are able to configure your own email server, which I can do because I act as the virtual admin for my domain, you can often specify how the server’s spam filter handles messages it deems are junk. (That’s where the oft-repeated wisdom “Check your email’s filter settings” comes from…)
I know that’s vague, but there’s a universe of variations out there.
If you’re simply deleting mail after reading it, no spam filter should be trained on it. There are people, though, who think that the “mark as junk” button is the “delete” button. I know someone who was using the junk button to delete email from work colleagues; that quickly became a problem…
I have seen a webmail system that offer only “delete” or “Move” [to inbox] options for mail in its Junk file. That’s asking for trouble. In this case, I was getting large numbers of false positives and a very cumbersome “Move” procedure. Their help line said Moving it to the InBox would flag it as not spam, but that didn’t work; they kept flagging mail from the same sources as spam. Their spam would even put email from addresses or sites that I had whitelisted in the spam. The only explanation for that behavior was bad design or the webmail and/or spam system. I don’t know how many such badly designed systems are out there, but I would be surprised if this is the only one.
I found it to be hit or miss. Adding a sender to the address book, which is supposed to keep mail from getting junked, is also unreliable.
In Mail it’ll be in the left-hand sidebar under the section for that particular account (iCloud, Gmail, etc.). I think this only works for IMAP accounts. For POP accounts, you might have to go to the webmail interface…?
I’ve run across that too!