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Why Is Junk Mail Filter Not Working?

Mac Mail doesn’t seem to respect when I tag an email as junk. The darn junk mail still keeps coming. Also, when I tag an email as NOT junk it keeps going to the junk mailbox. Is there a way to fix this?

it’s frustrating to have to keep scanning my junk mail folders for six mail accounts looking for valid emails that I keep telling Mac Mail they are not junk.
—–
Kurt

Comments: 2 Responses to “Why Is Junk Mail Filter Not Working?”

    2 years ago

    If you tag one email as junk, it will mark that one email as junk. But you said "junk mail still keeps coming" which implies you are getting emails after that. Same for your next statement about tagging something as junk.

    Maybe you mean "email address" not "email message." Moving an email MESSAGE to junk doesn't somehow mark that email ADDRESS as "email that appears to be from this address is always (not) junk." That's not what that function does. You are just manually filing away that one message as junk.

    If you want email to be automatically filtered as junk/not junk, that really needs to be done on the server. Some servers are better than others at this (Google, Apple) and some are bad (I think HotMail is one of the worst).

    You can create a filter for that email address to say "always consider email from this sender to be junk" (or the opposite). But that is done as a rule or filter. And that is also best done on the server. Both iCloud and Gmail (and others) have good filter/rules systems. But you have to do them on the server. Usually there is a web-based version of the email system where you can access this.

    Also note that most real spam comes from fake email addresses. If you create a rule to stop a specific email address, that is a waste of time as that is probably the only time a spammer will use that fake email address to send to you. On the other hand, legitimate commercial email (sales, newsletters, marketing, etc) will usually include "unsubscribe" links in the message. Use those. They work in most cases.

    See https://macmost.com/how-to-really-stop-getting-spam-email.html for more info.

    Bob Folsom
    2 years ago

    I faced this same issue and the problem was my ISP several years ago. Regardless of how I dealt with an email on my machine at the time my ISP would classify some senders as Junk and they would be in the Junk folder when I saw them (if I saw them). Adding those senders to the Address Book in my account with the ISP resolved the issue and I've had no problems since. B

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