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You are here: MacNN Forums > Software - Troubleshooting and Discussion > Applications > Problems with Mail's junk filter

Problems with Mail's junk filter
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Grizzled Veteran
Join Date: Nov 2002
Location: London, UK
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Jun 5, 2005, 08:54 PM
 
Hey all,

I've had Tiger installed for a few weeks now, but still having problems with the junk filter. Despite getting around 100 junk mails every day, and marking them all as such, Mail still only seems to catch maybe 20% of them itself.

I don't remember it taking this long to get Mail trained when Panther arrived. Is anyone else seeing this problem, and can you think of a way to fix it?

Cheers,

J.
By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out - Richard Dawkins
     
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Join Date: Aug 2004
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Jun 5, 2005, 09:38 PM
 
Yeah, it's pretty flaky for me...it gets more than 20% of mine, but A LOT still gets through every single day that supposedly fall under the "Junk Rule" parameters.
     
Senior User
Join Date: Mar 2002
Location: Golden, CO
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Jun 15, 2005, 05:14 PM
 
I've actually never seen mail mark a message as junk since installing Tiger. I've confirmed that the prefernce settings for this are correct and Mail is still in training mode. I even tried deleting the preferences plist and everything and still no go. Has anyone found a solution for this?
     
Mac Elite
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: columbus, oh
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Jun 15, 2005, 06:04 PM
 
Yea, I had to redo the prefs and start in training mode all over. So far, it's about 1 out of 11 messages that are not marked, but its getting a little better. Still sucks compared to Panther.
"Another classic science-fiction show cancelled before its time" ~ Bender

15.2" PowerBook 1.25GHz, 80GB HD, 768MB RAM, SuperDrive
     
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Jun 15, 2005, 08:21 PM
 
Which prefs did you trash to restart the training? I don't want to trash all my mail prefs if possible.

Also, do you leave it in training mode, or can you put it into normal mode and then continue marking the mail that's junk while letting it filter out the stuff it thinks is junk? in other words, will it continue to learn in both modes.
By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out - Richard Dawkins
     
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Jun 15, 2005, 08:29 PM
 
Which prefs did you trash to restart the training? I don't want to trash all my mail prefs if possible.

Also, do you leave it in training mode, or can you put it into normal mode and then continue marking the mail that's junk while letting it filter out the stuff it thinks is junk? in other words, will it continue to learn in both modes.
By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out - Richard Dawkins
     
Grizzled Veteran
Join Date: Jan 2001
Location: usa
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Jun 16, 2005, 11:52 AM
 
My advice to you would be to use SpamSieve. While I don't use Mail.app that much, I think SpamSieve does support it. It has done an amazing job with my mail.

http://c-command.com/spamsieve/
     
Grizzled Veteran
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Jun 17, 2005, 08:41 PM
 
Thanks for that, I'll look into it and run the trial. I'm annoyed because the panther spam filter was excellent, but in tiger it just sucks. Annoys me when I have to buy software to do something that the os used to do just fine before the upgrade.

J.
By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out - Richard Dawkins
     
Senior User
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Feb 15, 2006, 03:20 PM
 
Just thought I would update this thread with my latest efforts and see if anyone can shed some new light on this. I just bought a 17" Intel iMac and used Migration Assistant to transer my files. As I guessed, it brought over this problem of mail not marking messages as junk. I also tried quitting mail, then going to ~/Library/Mail and deleting the files relating to the the junk filter (I forget their names at the moment). These are the files which Mail uses to identify junk, one is the default settings, and the other is the learned behavior. I deleted both plus the .backup file for the default. That did not work.

Then out of curiosity, I created a new user on the system to see if that user could filter junk. After about a week Mail still had never marked a single message as junk, so this doesn't seem to be a user preference issue.

Another thought I had was that I was using Tiger's .Mac sync to save my Mail preferences and mailboxes. The idea was that I was fixing the problem, but it was being brought back by the sync. However, I've had this turned off for 6 months now and still have this issue even after retrying everything I could think of. So I doubt that's the problem.

Today I reinstalled Mail from the iMac restore DVD, so we'll see if that works. I kind of doubt it though. Anyone have any other ideas I can try? All I'm left with now is to reinstall OS X. I bet that would work, but it bugs me that I would have to go to those measures to solve this problem. I want to out smart this thing dang it!
     
   
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