Have you ever received an email from a Nigerian prince promising 50% share on Billions of diamonds? Of course. We all have received that. And unless, you recently joined this trend of emailing, you know it’s not true. Although, I daydream constantly about that email being authentic, I know it’s not.
It’s spam: one of the most infuriating problems with emails. As easy and effective emails have made our communication abilities around the world, it has also made it easier for spammers to either fool gullible users or annoy the ones who won’t fall into the trap.
Fortunately, emailing services and email clients are constantly improving their machine-learned algorithms to detect these spams. However, they are far from being perfect.
Today, we are going to learn how to keep such people out of your inbox. This article focuses on Mac Mail specifically, but few of the tipcs can be applied to other clients as well. We can tweak certain settings to make Mac Mail better at automatically blocking these emails entirely or move them into spam folder.
How to enable default spam settings in Apple Mail
To begin, you need to enable the default junk mail filtering in Apple Mail settings. Go to ‘Mail’ at the top –> Preferences, and check the box that says “enable junk mail filtering.”
But there’s more. You can check other settings and decide what you want to do with them according to your preferences.
- – Mark spam as junk mail, but leave it in your inbox.
- – Make them as junk and also move them to spam folder.
The other three settings are kinda the reverse of what we are talking here. They make certain emails safe and avoid them from moving to spam.
Do you have friends that constantly bug you with lame attempt at humor. As much lame as they can be, I still enjoy reading them. Other times, your work emails might contain words that Mac Mail might consider spam. And there are few other examples where you would actually want an email that the algorithms mistake for spam.
So, check these three next boxes to avoid that from happening:
- – Sender of messages in your contacts
- – Sender of messages that you have preciously communicated with.
- – Emails that contain your FULL NAME.
There’s also an option to filter junk email before applying your ‘rules.’ Rules are those that you manually setup to do certain actions to emails automatically. For example, I’ve setup the rule that any message that contains the full name of the company I work for should never be sent to spam.
Therefore, this particular option is important to turn it on. Still, it’s your personal preference that wether you’d want emails to go to spam first and then the rules are applied to regular emails or the other way around.
Next up is ‘advanced settings.’ As you might have guess, these settings are quite advanced. The trouble with tweaking these settings is that if you are not absolutely sure of what you are doing, you might miss a lot of emails that might be important for you. Therefore, tread carefully on these roads.
The ‘Advanced Settings’ section is quite complicated and therefore cannot be dealt entirely on this post. For now, I would recommend to avoid them if you are not experienced with that.
Tips for Spam Settings in Apple Mail
Another tip: if you ever see a spam email penetrate through your wall of rules and settings to the main inbox, always mark it as spam manually. Mac Mail algorithms will learn to tighten the security for that sender and for other similar natured emails from next time.
One last tip: check your spam folder once in a week or whenever you have the time. This is to make sure none of your important emails are getting lost there. If you see a proper emails (not spam), move it to inbox.
Lastly, if you are a huge email user, in-built spam filtering settings for Apple Mail might not be enough for you. Fortunately, there are third-party programs that can be used with Apple Mail to secure your fortification even further. I am not naming any application here, but you can you easily do a quick Google search to look for the best ones.
Keep in mind that Apple Mail default spam filter is quite good and might be enough for majority of users. Go to third-parties only if you truly need more spam settings in Apple Mail.