Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com.
On today's episode let's look at stopping junk mail.
There are many ways to prevent junk mail from reaching your inbox.
You may be tempted right away, if you are using Apple Mail, to go right to Mail, Preferences,
go to Junk Mail, and then enable junk mail filtering and leave the burden all on your
email client program, Apple Mail, to filter it out here at the last minute just before
it hits your inbox.
But what you should actually do is before you go here, this should be the last resort,
you should go to your ISP, your internet service provider that provides you with the email
service, and try to set up spam filtering there.
Now if you use say gmail then spam filtering is automatic and it is very good in gmail
because it is basically crowd sourcing the whole thing.
Now junk mail or spam is completely unsolicited email.
If it is something that say you signed up for but you no longer want to get it, it is
so important that you don't use the junk mail button here or in gmail or anywhere else but
instead use the unsubscribe button that you find at the bottom.
You will find this in any legitimate piece of email.
So look here first, see if you find this, and then hit that button to cleanly get you
off without penalizing the company that sent out the email.
After all you were the one that asked for it so you need to do the responsible thing
and ask to not get it rather than jumping right to the spam button.
I highly recommend that you use a transportable email address like one from gmail or yahoo
or a Microsoft account.
Something that you have no matter what ISP you are using.
If you use an account from say Comcast or Verizon or any provider like that where they
are providing the physical connection to the internet you can very easily loose that email
account by simply moving.
If you move to another neighborhood you could find that you can't get that same service
there and now you no longer have that email account.
So it is a bad idea to ever use your ISP's email and you should use something you can
transport.
Apple's iCloud service for instance.
It doesn't matter where in the world you are or which provider you've got for internet
you can always use that.
Those services generally have better spam filtering.
However if you are stuck, for some reason, using a service like Comcast you can very
easily search for Comcast junk mail settings or Verizon junk mail settings and come up
very quickly with links to information or maybe directly to the settings for junk mail
for setting it up on the server so that spam never hits your inbox.
You should set that up before you even consider setting up junk mail filtering on your Mac
itself.
So now let's look at your last line of defense.
That is the junk mail filtering inside of the Apple Mail app.
You go into preferences there and under Junk Mail this is where you can enable it.
You have several different settings.
Of course you want to set it up so if the sender is in your contacts that it won't be
sent there.
You want to try to basically prevent false positive.
That is what most of this stuff is for.
Now the junk mail filtering in mail will learn as you use it.
So as you mark things as spam it will get better and better.
But of course it is only learning from you as opposed to say using gmail or something
where it is learning from millions of other people who are marking things as junk mail
and marking them as not junk mail as well.
So it is not going to be as good as other filtering solutions out there but you can
still use it and still set this up so that it doesn't get as many false positives.
In addition to using just the regular junk mail filters you can also set up rules here.
So a rule can take something into account like having something in the subject and having
some text in there and then immediately move it to junk.
So if you find something that is slipping through junk mail filters all the time, just
like with gmail, you can set something up that automatically filters it to go out right
to junk mail.
So to have it learn you want to select the email and hit this button here which marks
it as junk mail.
You can select multiple messages.
You can use shift key, select a range or you can use the command key to select multiples.
Once you select multiples you can mark them all as junk there.
But it is just as important to go into your junk mail folder and if you see something
that is not junk then you can give it the thumbs up and it will mark as not junk and
learn from that as well.
So you want to kind of do both to improve it.
You just want to check your junk mail folder once in a while anyway to look for false positives.