why doesn't Mail's spam filter work?

[cwoody222]

Anyone else using the Rules option in Mail? I am...but it doesn't work.

I clearly have a filter to delete any mail with the word 'confirmation' in the sujbect line.

Today I got an email with "re: travel confirmation" as the subject.

90% of my filters are for Spam - so it's not like another one is letting the message thru...the only "good" Rules I have are if the message is from a few, select people.

So...what the heck? Can anyone offer any assistance?

[Steve Bosell]

i dont know if this is the best way to do it, but i move everything that does not contain my email address to a folder named junk mail. this filters out 90% of the spam i get

[Red Phoenix]

You might check to see that another filter is getting to it first. Mail.app goes through the filter list in the order you see them, and if a particular e-mail's been filtered, it doesn't go any further with it. Try dragging the spam filter to the top of the list, and see if that works.

[cwoody222]

Oops...yep, that was it. One of the filters on the very top puts all mail with my email address in my Inbox.

Some spam, I guess, actually had my email address in it.

One problem solved...

[Jadey]

I just love to bounce that spam. No other email application that I've used had that feature built in.

[Red Phoenix]

I love that feature too, but I can't use it all the time. I have some mail forward to other accounts, and so bouncing would only give the spammer another account in that case. So I have to go through the headers of the spam, and that kind of defeats the purpose.

[Wordman]

I have a similar problem, but the original poster's solution does not work for me. I've found that a good rule for me is if the sender is not in my address book and the content is HTML containing an image. Generally, people whose mail I actually want to read who are not sophisticated enough to turn HTML off when they send mail are also not sophisticated enough to embed images in their mail, so any HTML with an image is spam.

Problem is that building this rule in Mail.app seems to be impossible. Normally, to check for an image, you set the filter up to flag "<img" in the body of the message. You can do this in Mail, but it the resulting filter does not seem to work. I'm thinking that what might be happening is that Mail doesn't parse the raw HTML stream of HTML mail, but considers "Message Content" to mean the rendered text only. If so, this is really irritating.

Anybody have any ideas on getting around this?

[Giaguara]

spam filters seem to work well on me.

everytime i start to get mails that i dont like and have a rule, i create that rule. probably i loose about 1 % of my mails too but no one is supposed to send me mails about how to loose pounds, get more inches, Nigeria, webcams, anything with any porno term, and especially with to remove or cancel yourself or from january 1 2002 the European .. viagra, get a vip pass, rbrowser, rbexpress, lycos, tripod etc etc etc. Yes, all emails coming from Lycos and tripod get cancelled. 90 % of hotmails are spam so i think i add if the sender is not in the address book and contains hotmail.com, cancel.