Hello,
I use Mail.app for my mailing and I get lots of Spam. Any ideas how to minimize it?

I tried sending it back (via the return function, don't know the proper English word, sorry), but no relevant results yet.

Any ideas? Would be great!

Greetings,
Steve

[OreoCookie]

Get Spam Sieve. I've virtually got zero spam (of almost 7000 spam mails and 1600 filtered good mails, there have been 6 false positives and 43 false negatives). Best $35 I've invested.

Spam Sieve integrates with virtually every mail app (Mail, Entourage, etc.), you just need to switch off Mail's junk mail filter and create a few rules (one is minimum).

[DarkStarRed]

Ok I'll bite the bullet... you really start some weird threads sometimes.
First never click on suspicious mails or try to open them with another app just to see what it is! Even so you can still check it has Junk-mail & report it has spam, via your online mail filter.

If your using MobileMe then when online ctrl-click the messages which are suspicious & select from the drop down-list "Junk" then when click on within the Junk-Folder click the message you should see in the top-bar of the mail (coloured brown) two tabs click on Report has Spam.
If your using another mail account such has GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail etc they should have something similar wait to hear from others that use those to set up your filter.

[pcryan5]

I just use the built in spam "filtering" in Entourage - unless I explicitly allow a sender their email goes into my junk folder. Once a week I'll peek at the contents. It's not *GREAT* but with fewer then 100 regular correspondents it works fine for me.

[Jasoco]

I send all my email through Gmail. It gets most of it. By which I mean 95%. Mail gets the 4.99% that Gmail doesn't and I end up with like one or two that make it through all my defenses like once every few weeks.

[pcryan5]

My ISP (Shaw here in Western Canada) does a pretty decent job of catching most of mine as well before it hits my inbox.

"Steve" - doesn't your ISP provide such an option for your account?

[moep]

I second the Spamsieve suggestion. It really does work amazingly well for a client side spam filter.

[JKT]

Originally Posted by SteveJobs 

I tried sending it back (via the return function, don't know the proper English word, sorry), but no relevant results yet.

Absolutely do NOT do this. All it does is confirm to the spammer that your account is active or (and far more likely these days) it will never reach them anyway as it is being sent from a malware infested Windows box unbeknownst to the owner, using their e-mail account details and not those of the spammer.

Effectively, all that bouncing (as it is termed in English) spam messages does is increase the amount of spam passing through the internet and nothing else.

[analogue SPRINKLES]

For the past few months I have been getting 1-10 spam messages a day when 8 months ago I would only get that amount in a week or more.

Today I got fed up and found a setting on my domain/email host to set up "Spambox".

The way it works is you add all your regular contacts to a whitelist and their emails get though to you as normal. If someone outside of this whitelist emails you it sends them a reply saying they have to reply to that automated message first and THEN it will get sent to my inbox.

Also if I email someone they are auto added to my whitelist. If a spammer actually replies to the varification I can easily just go and blacklist him permanetly.

I can also set up the blacklist to ignore any email from any domain or blacklist based on the subject line.

It also keeps a queue of all pending confirmation emails so if I see someone i know emailing me but they didn't verify it yet I can just choose "whitelist and deliver".

my webhost is www.wirenine.com

[ph0ust]

there are lots of anti-spam products. gmail works great; its what i use and they host my own domain as well. i'm sure others have positive things to say about alternatives.

you want to NOT GET spam? here is what you have to do. it is the only thing i have found that works, but even it is subject to human stupidity and fails eventually.

create 2 new accounts (e.g. [email protected] and [email protected]). NEVER, EVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES give out the first account. use it only for emailing friends and family. don't register online with it. don't do ANYTHING with it other than give it to people you communicate with. people=friends, family, etc. NOT businesses, associations, clubs, or anything other than friends and family. use the second account for everything else. registering for web forums, news, shopping, whatever.

if you stick to this, you should be in good shape until some jackass you know starts emailing you articles from the nytimes website or something. then some admin there sells their email list to some spammer to buy his girlfriend tickets to medieval times. in my case, i was good for about 6 years. now i too am screwed

the other thing you can do is use the service that denies everyone access to your email until they confirm themselves, but that seems sort of high maintenance to me. good luck.

[zykron]

If you get that sick of spam being downloaded to your computer, then it's time to switch to Webmail. Mail.app downloads the mail, and I don't want spam on my hard drive. It can stay there on the mail server for all I care. Plus, if you use (and register for) Fastmail, they let you program your own SIEVE mail filter. Get to know SIEVE, as those who don't are already in a world of pain/spam/bulljunk.