Apple mail occasionally marks ‘valid’ mail as spam. Mail used to have the means to stop that using a box to tic. I’m getting several ‘valid’ emails being dumped into the Spam (and all its asterisks) mailbox that don’t belong there. Not all of these should become “Contacts”, they’re simply valid conversations. Thanks.
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John Stires
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What Happened To “Mark As Not Spam” or Its Equivalent?
Comments: 4 Responses to “What Happened To “Mark As Not Spam” or Its Equivalent?”
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Like many things in Mail, the functionality is really on the server, not in the client. The Mail app is just giving you commands and buttons to send messages to the server to do various things, like delete or archive email, reply, put into a folder/mailbox, etc. But the functionality is all on the server. Mail is just showing you a reflection of what the server is showing.
As for Junk, most people just use the server-side junk email filtering. So the server puts mail in the Junk folder, and the Mail app is just showing you the Junk folder contents on the server.
So marking email as "not spam" is just a matter of moving it out of the Junk folder and placing it in your Inbox, Archive, or anywhere else.
I use two email servers: iCloud and Gmail. For Gmail, I can simply go into the Junk folder in Mail, then take a message from there and drag it to the Inbox. This removes it from the Gmail junk folder (actually Junk "label," in Gmail vocabulary). With iCloud, I can do the same. However, with iCloud the Mail app also changes the Junk mail button in the toolbar from Move Selected Message to Junk to Move Selected Messages to Inbox. I also see a "Mail thinks this message is Junk Mail" at the top and a "Move to Inbox" button.
However, looking back at my Gmail Junk folder in Mail, I see some messages have the "Mail thinks this message is Junk Mail" too -- but not all. I believe these are ones where I manually pressed the Junk button instead of Delete. Those ones have a "Not Junk" button and a "Move to Junk" button at the top. I guess Mail doesn't recognize that they are already in the Junk folder for some reason.
Anyway, I guess that the answer is: it depends. Which email service are you using? Are these messages marked by you as Junk, by the server, or maybe you are still using the old Mail Junk Filter (I stopped using that a long time ago).
At this point I'm not sure who is marking them "*****SPAM*****" instead of, "Mail thinks this message is Junk Mail, Load remote content, Move to inbox.".
My guess ("duh" at this point) is my ISP is using the former method and "Mail" is using the latter. It looks as if I'll need to see what My ISP can do to give me alternatives. Thanks G.
Gary, maybe it's because I don't use gmail but I don't understand your answer. I would just like to know what happened to the "Not Junk Mail" command, because when I use the "Move to Inbox" command instead I am not getting any assurance that future email from the same source will not keep being sent to the Junk Mail folder.
Are you using Mail's junk mail filter setting? If not (I certainly don't) then moving email out of any junk mail folder is all you need to do. There's no "signal" to send to your email service other than that. Your email service doesn't care, it filters based on other factors (or fails to filter in the case of many ISP email services).