I wish to stop Spam downloading on mail

but have discovered that because Mail on iMac and iPad is IMAP cannot appear to do this! I use Sky and have changed setting on the Yahoo Webmail. Have asked about this on the Sky Forum and got the response cannot be done on IMAP.
Does anyone know any differently?

Spam filtering has more to do with the way your ISP detects and separates spam from normal mail. Shouldn't matter if it's IMAP or PoP. I don't know what Yahoo told you but they should be filtering spam out at the server. I use gmail as my ISP and almost never receive spam in my mail downloads.

I wish I could get six numbers in Monday's Lotto.

I use an email forwarding service to do my spam filtering. Check out pobox.com, they provide three aliases for you to use to have mail forwarded to your real mailbox. so, for example, [email protected] will be filtered and then forwarded to whatever mailbox you tell them to use. Their filter is pretty good, I rarely get spam anymore. They do hold what they filter out so that if you want you can review and release what should not have been filtered. I checked for the first six months or so, now I don't bother. If they say it's spam, it's spam. Cost is very reasonable, too.

EDIT: Oh, by the way, if you change IPSs you don't have to tell everyone, just tell Pobox to use the new address instead of the old. Done!

For the OP, you don't say how much SPAM you're getting or many other details, but you could check Apple's own kb articles if you haven't done so already, and also maybe do a web search on " SPAM Mail on iMac and iPad " etc.

Getting rid of SPAM or at least getting it under control can take some training time and extra work. Something that some can't be bothered to do.

Mail (Mavericks): Change the junk mail filter
iCloud: Why am I getting junk mail (spam)?
https://www.google.ca/search?client...&oe=UTF-8&gfe_rd=cr&ei=f131U6rMJ6aV8QfYwIG4CQ

There is no such thing as a spam-free mailbox. So first you need to get to grips with reality.

There is certainly a lot your provider (with *your help*) can do to cut down very dramatically on the amount of spam you receive (or at least see in your inbox, anyway). You can religiously report spam to your ISP, you can properly train Mail's built in Junk mailbox (I find that VERY FEW people do this extremely important and useful step), you can sign up for a service with a good reputation for filtering spam (ironically including Google) and you can engage a go-between service like SpamAssassin. You can set up a "public" address where everything goes to Junk and keep a "private" email that is not used on the web.

In short, if you want less spam, be a little more pro-active.

thanks for replies. Have looked at the Junk settings but as the spam goes into Bulk email things will not change.

You can setup a Rule(s) in Mail and have all emails filtered and even deleted if you trust them enough. But you might want to try some less drastic commands first before committing to them.

Lots of help available for that, for example:
https://www.google.ca/search?client...&oe=UTF-8&gfe_rd=cr&ei=fRf2U67BA6qV8Qep84GABg