Junk Email

In Apple Mail, this is
View > Message > All Headers
This is what you send to SpamCop. SpamCop works very well.

Thank you, not sure why I didn’t notice that before. :woman_facepalming:t3: I’ll take a look at SpamCop as well.

I stopped using SpamCop when I noticed almost all of the reports were being sent to devnull.spamcop.net. What was the point of reporting spam if the providers weren’t interested in addressing the problem users?

As others have said, it just means that at some point, those sites were compromised in a way that revealed your email address and possibly more information, including your passwords for those sites.

If you still have accounts on those sites and haven’t changed their passwords, you should login and change the passwords. You should do that even if you no longer use those accounts, since you don’t want to make it easy for someone to pretend they are you using those accounts.

If you have used the same passwords on multiple sites, you should change your passwords accordingly. When an account is compromised, the crooks and scammers often will try to use the username/password from one site with other sites. If you can avoid it, never use the same password on multiple sites.

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I read this entire string…very interesting and informative. I solved my spam problem years ago with SpamSieve: Accurate Spam Filter for Mac. It simply works! I can send things to my SPAM folder (when I just get tired of reading them!), and then bring them back when I want to! It is, perhaps, a little trick to install (or re-install after upgrade), but they have very complete instructions and you soon learn the routine. Doesn’t stop pushing, of course, but I have complete control over what is spam and what is not. Highly recommended! Bye R@y

It is less satisfying when the SpamCop reports are devnull’d, but it does still have an effect: the reports feed data into the SpamCop Blocking List (SCBL). Email providers may use the SCBL, and other blacklists, to mark and filter spam.

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You are fortunate that you can label an email as spam and then resurrect it. However that is not always the case. Tidbits’ email is a good example. When it is put in a spam folder, your email address is flagged and you stop getting Tidbits emails until you beg Adam to re-instate your email. The same for Nextdoor and other companies. I use Comcast/Xfinity for email and although I have spam filters in place, some “good” email goes into spam.

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Thanks, Jane…didn’t know that! Still, SpamSieve is 99% great for the wide variety of e-mails I receive. I was surprised that no one mentioned it!
Bye R@y

How would Tidbits know that you put a Tidbits email in a spam folder? The only possible way would be if the mail provider rejected it at the SMTP level, and that would usually be out of your control.

Maybe it is trackers: TidBITS emails use them, and if your email client doesn’t load images for items in the Spam folder, the tracker wouldn’t track, so TidBITS could assume you’re no longer an active email address, and stop sending. But I’ve been using MailTrackerBlocker for over two years, which blocks the TidBITS trackers, with no ill effects. And Mail Privacy in Monterey and later renders trackers ineffective.

@ace Adam, do you want to reply on how Tidbits knows their emails have landed in a spam folder?

I heartily second the vote for SpamSieve. It is brilliant. Buy it, install it, and watch your spam headaches vanish. Remember to use the “SpamSieve - Train as Spam” and “SpamSieve - Train as Good” menu items that will appear in Apple’s Mail - use them liberally until you barely need to use them any more.

Am I right in thinking we still have no control over the junk mail that goes into the iCloud Junk folder? Rules in Mail don’t work in that folder, and there are no settings or rules available at icloud.com.
I have Mail arranged to use what Thunderbird calls unified folders, ie All Inboxes etc, and I have my three accounts set to use ‘All Junk’ as their Junk folder. This isn’t a problem, as I write rules to delete the frequent spam I get that goes there and annoys me. But spam that Apple sends to the Junk folder on iCloud stays there and never gets to All Junk. It has to be emptied manually.

Wish it worked on iPad and iPhone as well. You can do the spam drone thing though…if you have a macOS machine that’s always on but I’ve never gotten around to setting it up…I oughta try that.

I also look at my junk folder for mail that should not be in Junk. I do this regularly so that I don’t have to glance through hundreds.

I also look at my junk folders, but I select all and mark read when I finish rather than delete them, then just keep the unread filter turned on, so when I look at the collective junk folders (great feature of MacOS mail), it’s just the ones I’ve not yet reviewed.

SpamSieve’s author has how-to tips for that: SpamSieve Manual: iPhone Spam Filtering

Yup, Tidbits (and Discourse) are reacting to bounces caused by SMTP-time rejection, which also happens with iCloud for “policy reasons”. If you ask @ace, he might adjust your bounce threshold for you, but ultimately you’re losing email. And iCloud is by now rather well known for just vapourising (i.e. accepting, then discarding) mail that it considers suspicious, without letting you see it in your “Junk” folder. IMO whatever virtues iCloud Mail has, reliability isn’t one of them and you should just stay away unless you already have history with it. I signed up in a moment of weakness, but I regret it.

You can’t filter mail that goes direct to a spam box in Apple Mail without some intervention from a script that will “rescue” the mail and move it back to the Inbox for processing by Mail’s rules (and therefore by SpamSieve). The docs have instructions for using an AppleScript but I went back to a shell script launched from launchd to do this using command line tools. You obviously need an always-on machine to do this, as with SpamSieve and client-side filtering more generally.

For the first time that I can recall (ever), I received an email that had a Bcc line with my name (and only my name; no others) in it. The Bcc line appeared in the default headers in Apple Mail on a Mac; I did not need to show all headers or raw source. How did that happen?

FWIW, I received the email because I had been on a walking tour, and the email was from the tour leader. It was not personalized to me at all. As such, it would reasonably have gone to everyone on the tour (about ten people), but I have no idea whether it did or not.

I originally used Eudora then switched to Thunderbird then to Mail.app because the last seemed to do the better job of SPAM control. It still does as I only get a few messages in my junk folder, though I’ve noticed that if I delete several messages from my inbox without opening them (I scan the small snippets), that sender eventually gets treated as spam. That isn’t a problem because if I see something in the junk folder I do want to open, I can move it back to the inbox.

Anyway, I never felt the need to use a third-party SPAM filtering application with Mail.app. Are you saying you use SpamSieve with Mail.app, Ray?

Not @raymack, but I found mail.app’s junk mail filtering inadequate. I switched to SpamSieve back in 2008 and have never looked back. Apple’s junk filtering has probably improved since, but I’ll never know.