Filtering Spam in Apple Mail — Advanced

• UCSD's spam filtering system assigns each message a score, representing the probability that the message in question is spam.
• A message is tagged as spam if it receives a score of 5.0 or above, represented in the mail message in the X-Spam-Level header by the number of asterisks (*).
• Choosing a lower value will result in a greater volume of spam in your spam folder and also increase the likelihood of a legitimate mail message being sorted as spam.
• To determine the level at which you feel comfortable filtering, examine the assigned score on a variety of messages in your inbox.
• View the mail headers of your e-mail by highlighting a message.
• Click the View pull-down menu, and select Show All Headers. The spam score usually appears near the bottom.

• Open Apple Mail.
• From the Mailbox menu, choose New Mailbox.
• Call the mailbox Spam.
• Click OK.

• From the Mail menu, choose Preferences.

• Select the Rules icon.
• Click Add Rule.

• Click From and choose Edit Header List.

• In the Message Headers box, click the + button.
• Type X-Spam-Level.
• Click OK.

• Click From and choose X-Spam-Level.
• For Description, type Spam, and change the rule so that it reads as follows:

If any of the following conditions are met: X-Spam-Level Contains ****** (with the number of *'s equal to the number you decide after looking at your e-mail)

Perform the following actions: Transfer Message to mailbox: Spam

• Click OK.
• You may now close the Rules window.
• To create an exception for a specific e-mail, continue to Step 8; otherwise, skip to Step 9.

• In your Spam rule, change any to all in If any of the following conditions are met.
• Click the + button next to the line reading X-Spam-Level Contains ******.
• Change the new line to read From and Does not contain.
• Type the e-mail address you want to exclude in the final box (e.g., gblufin@hotmail.com).
• If you want to add more exceptions, repeat the above steps for each exception.

• Incoming e-mail that appears to be spam will automatically be moved to the new folder you created.
• It's possible for legitimate e-mail to be marked as spam. Periodically check the contents of the Spam folder to ensure that this has not occurred before deleting its contents.

• Apple has included a feature that heuristically filters spam. This means you train it with what you think is spam, and eventually it will "know you well enough" to be able to filter the spam into a separate mailbox.
• Some users find this method provides too many "false positives" where legitimate mail is labeled as "junk." To turn this feature off:
  1. Select Mail, then Preferences.
  2. Click on Junk Mail.
  3. Uncheck Enable junk mail filtering.