I am having trouble automatically sending junk mail to the trash. Junk filtering seems to work, but whether I use a RULE before or after Junk mail filtering, nothing seems to work and I have to manually delete JUNK mail that has been moved by Mac Mail to the JUNK folder.
I have also tried to use a different set of conditions (“Sender is NOT in my contacts, Sender is NOT in my previous recipients, the message is NOT addressed to my full name”) but nothing works.
Thanks for your help.
The Mac Mail junk filtering algorithm seems to be very good, and has not so far marked anything as JUNK when it was valid email. I trust its decisions and I would just like to automate the deletion.
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The Tominator
I'm not sure why that isn't working. Perhaps the messages you are seeing aren't being filtered by your Mac as junk at all. Perhaps it is your server (iCloud in your case) that is detecting that they are junk and putting them in your junk folder? Maybe that is why it isn't working since it isn't your Mac app detecting the Junk, but the server.
Here is what I recommend. Turn off Junk Mail Filtering in your Mac Mail app. This is old-fashioned junk mail filtering from 15 years ago and before iCloud. It is from before we all got email on multiple devices. It doesn't make sense anymore for your Mac to filter junk mail since your Mac isn't the only device getting email.
What makes sense is to have the junk mail filtered on the server. Servers can be much more effective at this. They can detect junk because they can see the thousands of similar messages sent at one time from one source and mark those as junk. Your Mac, just getting one message, can't do that. It just relies on the text of the message to figure it out and spammers have long ago found ways to get around that.
Either way, just have those messages go to the junk folder. There is no need to automatically have them be deleted. In fact, this can be a problem. If someone sends you something important and you didn't see it arrive, you can always check your junk mail folder for it. But if you delete them right away, then you can't do that. That important message may be lost forever.
Message in the Junk folder should automatically delete after 30 days. So you have those 30 days to recover a lost email. Other than that, you never need to look in Junk and can just leave those alone.
Do I need to turn on junk mail filtering on my iCloud email and if so where/how do I do this
David: No, there's no setting to switch on. Email servers like Apple's and Google's look for spam at the server level and fight it en masse.