Unfortunately, no. You can only choose actions available in the rules pop-up menu, and nothing allows deletion prior to downloading. The closest you can choose is one action that moves the email to the trash and marks it as read. But that will still download the emails to your computer in the process. (And for those with glacially slow internet, that’s a real issue.)
Also, unlike the choices available in Apple Mail (app) there is no selector available “Message Is Junk Mail” in iCloud’s rules. There is no “Delete Message” action available. If Apple would make the same Rules available on the iCloud.com website they make available in the application, then we’d have something.
If they would allow Rules to work in a mailbox other than only the Inbox in the Apple Mail application, that would at least allow deletion of Junk emails automatically, albeit after they’ve already been downloaded. That would help with some of the aggravation.
It seems like whoever made the Rules decisions wanted to ensure Junk mail couldn’t be well controlled. It can be sorted into Junk, but nothing done to it automatically afterward. The question, of course, is why?
However, I do agree the spammy Junk emails have greatly lessened in the last few weeks. I’ve gone from several hundred a day to well less than 100.
I have (fortunately) yet to experience this sudden influx on my iCloud accounts, and would probably have just managed it myself manually, but I do empathise strongly with the argument that it’s bad for the bandwidth-impaired. As others, given the brutish tendency of iCloud to just vaporise stuff it doesn’t like without warning, I can honestly say that I’d prefer to have the spam than not given the choice as long as it were directed into Junk. Still, it would be nice if Apple gave you direct control over the sieve scripts that run on your incoming mail, and Mail.app allowed you to filter non-Inbox mail. Under the circumstances, the best option is to run some remote drone with a good Internet connection that will filter and/or delete your spam for you directly using IMAP, rather than through Mail.app.
SpamSieve is masterful at spam detection and classification, agreed–user for almost 10 years . I guess I need to make a rule to delete the Junk folder messages daily, as I too am now getting 50-100 per day, almost all to my iCloud address that has been out there in use for 20 years. VERY few false positives in SpamSieve. I can risk just dumping the folder daily.
I think I posted too soon - the flood of (obvious) spam is back, just as bad as before. I thought Apple had figured out how to identify and block these, but I guess not. They are all obvious spam.
Same issue here: over the last month or so about 100 junk mails a day in my iCloud junk mail box. Not much variety in them, same half dozen titles over and over again. That suggests someone has figured out how to bypass Apple deleting them unseen by me as used to happen.
It wouldn’t help people with very slow internet connections, but it would help the rest of us if we could set the ‘All Junk’ folder as the junk folder for the iCloud account. In Preferences/Accounts/iCloud/Mailbox Behaviours, it is possible to set All Junk as the junk mailbox for iCloud, but this is ignored.
I have also tried adding the iCloud Junk mailbox to the Favorites (on the grounds that I thought this list of mailboxes were all ‘On My Mac’) and writing a rule to keep it emptied, but no luck.
The command opt-cmd-J mentioned above only empties the junk folder on your mac, not that in iCloud. That one is only emptied by opening it, selecting all and deleting.
I’d be happy if there was a setting or rule available on iCloud to keep the Junk folder emptied, or even to empty it at an interval, but there is neither. That would absolve Apple from responsibility for messages being deleted without me reading them, which some have said is forbidden.
Are you saying there used to be a way to have Apple delete junk rather than route it to your Junk mailbox? How were you able to do that? If there were a local or iCloud server setting that allowed that, I was never aware of it.
My impression, Al, is that Apple either deletes obvious spam without sending it on, and has stopped, OR, more likely, Apple still does but these spam messages (which are nearly all the same) have found a way to bypass Apple’s filters, perhaps by spoofing reputable addresses.
No, there never was a way for the user to auto-delete spam or impose any settings on Apple’s Junk mailbox.
The spam arms race continues, and it is only going to get worse as spammers invest in AI tools to generate much more deceptive emails. For the same reason, phishing attacks are getting more sophisticated.
One thing I have noticed is that a lot of my spam email has no content. I don’t know if the is because Apple is deleting the content or the senders are so stupid they can’t assemble a complete email. My spam now ebbs and flows - sometimes a lot, other days, not much at all - and most seems to arrive overnight.
This probably means that a spammer is looking to see if your address is valid. It’s a good idea to block the offending sender. It’s also a good idea to not open up an email from a strange address that has a heading that sounds suspicious.
I have used Apple as my primary email ISP since [dot]mac accounts were first offered and have never seen evidence that a single message has ever been deleted by Apple as obvious spam.
Oh, I have. I thought this was well known? (That Apple rejects messages without even putting them in the spam folder.)
I even just saw this happening recently. Last year I had changed a private domain from Google mail hosted back to my ISP’s hosted solution, but had one email account I auto-forwarded to an iCloud account rather than just keep that mail account running (it was shopping@ my old domain and 20 - 25 years ago I used it for online shopping when that was a new thing; I don’t need that anymore but I still have a few old online vendors I buy from.) But suddenly the weekly/monthly special emails stopped coming. I changed to forward to my Fastmail account and they started appearing again. They never hit the spam folder of iCloud - they just never appeared.
Just to test I changed the forward back to iCloud - sure enough, no email.
Apple definitely doesn’t deliver everything that an account receives.
Nor have I seen such evidence, but there again, we wouldn’t, would we? We won’t miss e-mails we never knew arrived. Either Apple does this, or by some magical means all the world’s spammers decided not to send me messages via my mac, me, or icloud address until a month ago…
A while ago all the emails from a Wine store I use stopped showing up. They said Apple Mail was blocking their emails for all their customers with Apple Mail addresses. I told them to use a gmail address I have, and those come through fine. They said they tried and tried to get Apple’s attention - I even sent Apple a complaint - but nothing worked, Then, about six months later, Apple started delivering the emails again. Something about selling alcohol triggered this, I think - though I had other wine merchant emails coming through without any problem. This was a case where I knew the email was missing and being deleted - but often I would never notice.,
For several months, one of my e-mail addresses (hosted by Yahoo) was receiving dozens of spam messages per day. Most got filtered to the Spam folder, but some made its way to my inbox. And then, about a week ago, most of them stopped arriving.
I don’t believe the criminal syndicates sending me phishing scams suddenly discovered my mailbox (which I very rarely use for much) when the barrage of spam started, and I absolutely don’t think they stopped sending them last week. It is far more likely that Yahoo has been silently dropping this content all this time, and the barrange start and stop aligned with some policy change (maybe because people were complaining about not receiving all their mail).
FWIW, my other mailboxes (Google and mail.com) did not see a corresponding surge in spam. And I use those mailboxes far more than my Yahoo mailbox. So I’m completely certain that they’re also performing silent blocking/deletion of spam messages, even though I don’t know what criteria they are using.
I have had similar problems with my personal domain, and from what I understand it’s not just Apple that won’t listen. The decision of what is spam and what isn’t now depends on “reputation management” based on things like complaints about spam, which are far from infallible. If somebody is forging your email address to spam – which can happen easily to any of us, especially if we’ve been around a while, we get marked as potential spammers, with very little way to complain about it. That’s probably what happened to your wine vendor. That effect bothers me, as a freelance writer, and I’m sure it bothers other small businesses. One of the ways I check people I’m looking to do business is how they send email, and when I see a business sending from a random gmail account, I consider it a sign to be wary of things like phishing scams.
I help manage an email list for my bike club. For about a week in the middle of March, email for that list sent to Apple Mail domains bounced. Since the list is also accessible as an online forum, we notified the folks at the affected addresses that they should check the forum regularly.
A question: If I go through the spam and “block” the email from addresses, what does that accomplish other than changing the icon attached to the email? I looked at Settings/Rules and you can’t use the “blocked” status to trigger any action.