Mac Mail Downloads Spam Mail from Gmail

[macpert]

My MacBook Air (Lion OS) has an iCloud mail account setup. This account links to my Gmail account. I have a couple of problems that need to be addressed urgently:
1. The Mac Mail is dowloading my Spam folder from Gmail which is not what I want to have happen. I only want my Inbox. I am using IMAP.
2. The Spam mail is being stored locally in a Mac folder on the laptop itself. I don't want these junk emails on my machine.
3. The timestamps for the 'Created', 'Opened' and 'Modified' dates for these Spam Emails all seem to be different and seem to indicate that these Spam Emails were manually opened. However I did not do so. I am wondering whether the Spam emails have infected my laptop with a virus which would make it see that the emails have been opened when in fact they have not.
Please try and address my specific questions urgently as I am very concerned there is a virus on my machine.

 

[ElDiabloConCaca]

1. "Unsubscibe" from the IMAP folders you do not wish to download:
http://www.polaine.com/2008/05/26/apple-mail-folder-subscriptions-and-gmail-imap/

2. Change where Mail.app stores the Junk mail by editing the account settings (in Mail.app's preferences). Look under the "Mailbox Behaviors" and ensure that "Store _____ on the server" is checked for Junk Mail. However, after you unsubscribe from GMail's junk folder, this step would be moot.

3. There is 0% chance your computer is infected with a virus -- there exists not a single virus for Mac OS X (a handful of trojans and malware products do exist, though). Junk mail senders use all kind of tactics to fool email servers and conceal the origins of the junk mail. These tactics include changing who the message is sent from, using proxies to conceal the origin of the email, and changing time and date stamps to make message appear as if they were sent from the past or the future.

Not to mention, with an IMAP account (like your GMail account), if you read an email on one computer, that email will show up as being "read" on ALL computers that have access to the IMAP email account. That's the beauty of IMAP: synchronization. If you delete an email in your inbox from GMail's web interface, that email also disappears from the inbox of Apple's Mail.app.

In short, just turn off synchronization for the Junk Mail, and rest easy: there is no chance in hell you're infected with a virus, because no viruses exist for Mac OS X. Everything you are experiencing is 100% normal, and it's simply a lack of understanding, not some malicious software, that's causing those things to happen.