I'm having one heck of a time with junk mail

[Randy B. Singer]

I wonder what can be done about that?

For most of us...nothing. While there are programs like SpamSieve that will intercept spam and keep it out of your in-box, there are no products or services that will keep marketeers from sending spam to you to begin with. It will remain that way as long as sending spam is inexpensive, effective, and legal; or in the event that it is illegal, not easily traceable.

A few very industrious folks create multiple e-mail accounts, and have specific accounts for interacting with entities that might use your e-mail address to send spam, or who might sell your e-mail address to be used by spammers. That way your personal e-mail address theoretically stays hidden from any other than personal acquaintances. But that's all a bunch of work and inconvenience to go through. Using SpamSieve, IMHO, is world's easier.

Now, part of my normal email ritual is opening mail, going to the spam folder, then highlighting and deleting them all at once. More of an annoyance than anything else I guess.

I don't see that as much of an annoyance. Much much more of an annoyance is not receiving legitimate important e-mail that anti-spam software deleted as a false-positive.

 

[Rod]

I suppose everybody would like an extension, utility or app that would remove everything that person considers to be spam to a folder where it could be reviewed or simply emptied with the confidence that it contains nothing of importance.
It seems nothing of the sort exists (yet), although Spam Sieve comes close you still have to "teach" it what you consider to be spam.

I'm just happy that I don't have to deal with it on a daily basis, as per my previous post. I can set aside a convenient time to review mark and delete that suits me.

Not opening obvious spam is an important point. Right clicking on a known spam email allows me to delete or mark as spam. Opening it first ensures I will get more from the same sender.

 

[Randy B. Singer]

I suppose everybody would like an extension, utility or app that would remove everything that person considers to be spam to a folder where it could be reviewed or simply emptied with the confidence that it contains nothing of importance.
It seems nothing of the sort exists (yet), although Spam Sieve comes close you still have to "teach" it what you consider to be spam.

I don't know how else you would be able to have a program "know" what you personally consider to be spam and what you don't consider to be spam if you didn't train it. I find the way that SpamSieve does it to be close to ideal. Training SpamSieve is just about trivially easy, and it sure is worth the effort.

Indeed, because SpamSieve uses this method of identifying spam, and not a simple blacklist, it has proven next to impossible for spammers to get around SpamSieve.

Not opening obvious spam is an important point. Right clicking on a known spam email allows me to delete or mark as spam. Opening it first ensures I will get more from the same sender.

I just want to note that e-mail messages in Apple's Junk folder, or in SpamSieve's Spam folder, are restricted from phoning home. So you can open them and inspect them safely to your heart's content.

 

[krs]

I don't see that as much of an annoyance. Much much more of an annoyance is not receiving legitimate important e-mail that anti-spam software deleted as a false-positive.

It's certainly possible that a valid email ends up being tagged as spam, however there is no 100% guarantee that every email one sends is actually delivered.
So important information should either not be sent by email at all or the sender should ask for confirmation from the recepient that the email was actually received.
Everybody of course does what they feel comfortable with, all I know is that I have never had any issues (that I know of) by my ISP filtering out the spam.
But I also use "throw-away email addresses especially for sites with whom I expect to deal only once or twice.

 

[krs]

I don't know how else you would be able to have a program "know" what you personally consider to be spam and what you don't consider to be spam if you didn't train it.

I wanted to mention that point earlier.
What some consider spam, others see that as a valid (but perhaps annoying)marketing tool.
I have ordered items from WayFair so I don't consider emails i get from them as "spam"
I had to dig through my Trash folder to earlier this year to find a "spam" email, the sender was "Do It In Bed" - so that email went straight into the trash.

I really feel for the members here who are struggling with dozens of spam messages each day.

 

[Randy B. Singer]

It's certainly possible that a valid email ends up being tagged as spam, however there is no 100% guarantee that every email one sends is actually delivered.
So important information should either not be sent by email at all

I'm sorry, but I don't see that as a valid argument. There is no 100% guarantee that a telegram, snail mail, fax, etc. will be delivered either. But all of these tend to be extremely reliable. One does the best that one can. E-mail is not so un-reliable that one ever has to avoid using it. Businesses use it all the time because it is plenty reliable.

How this logically relates to the problem of server-based anti-spam software keeping you from ever seeing false-positives, I don't know.

or the sender should ask for confirmation from the recepient that the email was actually received.

That might be an additional step that one can take for absolutely vital individual communications. But no one does that for the regular course of important business communications. It would be onerous to do so.

I certainly don't see it as a reasonable remedy to the possibility that a server-based anti-virus program will do a false-positive on an important legitimate e-mail and as a result you will never see it.

...all I know is that I have never had any issues (that I know of) by my ISP filtering out the spam.

On the other hand, if your ISP was filtering out e-mails that you would have preferred to receive, and the sender never got around to telling you that they had sent you an e-mail, how would you know that you had been missing important e-mails?

I suppose that the importance of one's scheme to deal with spam rests with what sort of correspondence you are sending and receiving. If you miss an e-mail from your mom, it's probably not going to ruin your life. However, if you are an attorney, and you miss one or more e-mails from a client, or the court, or from opposing counsel, it could be a huge problem at best, and a disaster at worst.

 

[Pasquanel]

Randy, after being inundated with spam emails for months now I decided to follow your advice and I installed SpamSieve. After a week or a bit longer I was dubious but kept training it and suddenly all was well! This is the solution I was looking for, it does not delete anything but puts it all in my junk folder! The accuracy seems to be near 100%, thanks for this bit of advice, it's much appreciated!

 

[Randy B. Singer]

Randy, after being inundated with spam emails for months now I decided to follow your advice and I installed SpamSieve. After a week or a bit longer I was dubious but kept training it and suddenly all was well! This is the solution I was looking for, it does not delete anything but puts it all in my junk folder! The accuracy seems to be near 100%, thanks for this bit of advice, it's much appreciated!

I'm glad that it's working the way that you want it to! I can tell you that SpamSieve is the first thing that I install on a new Mac of my own. I find it to be invaluable.

The spammers constantly try to find new ways to get around SpamSieve, but it is for naught. If a new type of spam e-mail slips by SpamSieve, you just mark it as spam and SpamSieve will never be fooled by that type of spam again!

 

[MacInWin]

The spammers constantly try to find new ways to get around SpamSieve, but it is for naught. If a new type of spam e-mail slips by SpamSieve, you just mark it as spam and SpamSieve will never be fooled by that type of spam again!

Ah, if only that really happened for me. For me, SS handles about 70% of the spam, but the remainder get through. For those that get through, I mark them, it removes them for that day, but the next day those same spammers get past SS again. I know it's never possible to be perfect, and 70% is better than nothing, but from my experience I think it's a bit strong (and demonstrably false in my case) to say "never...again." And it does seem to be the same spammers over and over. For the last week or so I have been getting between 4 and 10 a day telling me my cloud storage is full (it's not) and that Apple will delete all my photos as a result (They won't because I have plenty of room.) I mark each and every one as spam, and SS never blocks them beyond that.

Today it was various emails about McAfee wanting me to "Confirm Your Final Decision!" I got six of those. SS caught none of them. At least the cloud storage folks seemed to have stopped! It wasn't SS because there aren't any of the cloud storage in the Spam folder today.

I'm really glad it's working so well for others, though!

Before anybody starts to try to "help," I don't really care. I've "trained" SS on thousands of emails, and it doesn't improve beyond about 70%.

Maybe I have a "better" set of spammers?

 

[Randy B. Singer]

Ah, if only that really happened for me. For me, SS handles about 70% of the spam...

You are the only person that I've ever heard of first hand who didn't find their SpamSieve results to be near miraculous....aside from myself.

I've been using SpamSieve for many years now. A number of years ago SpamSieve's accuracy on my main everyday Mac started to fall off precipitously. I did more and more training, but SpamSieve's accuracy only got worse. I contacted the developer and he was extremely helpful. He even had anticipated such a scenerio in SpamSieve's manual. It turns out that I just had to follow some simple directions, and SpamSieve's accuracy was quickly back up close to 100%:

https://c-command.com/spamsieve/help/why-is-spamsieve-not-ca

Before anybody starts to try to "help," I don't really care.

Ummm...okay. I suspect that there is no real problem with the product itself, that you just need to invest the interest to do some simple troubleshooting or to contact the developer for assistance.

 

[MacInWin]

Spoke too soon. Got another "ALL YOUR PHOTOS WILL BE DELETED" email this morning. That's easily 50 of them I've received, and I've trained SS on the previous 49. Maybe my copy of SS is a slow learner? What is strange is that I actually got TWO of them, and SS caught one, let the other one go. As far as I can see, they were identical.

Randy, I've seen and read that document at the link probably a dozen times and nothing on it makes SS any better. But thanks for the link. It may be handy for others who read this thread.

The reason I said I don't care is that I don't want to muck with it any more. I spent hours and hours training SS to get it to that 70% level. I have other things to worry about and don't want to waste any more time on it. It takes a fraction of a second to delete each spam message and with 70% reduction, it's livable.

 

[rbpeirce]

I don't think the two events are related. I have also noticed a huge uptick in spam email in the last week. I use SpamSieve, and it's kind of "meh" at blocking the spam for me. I've trained and trained it with probably a couple of thousand messages thus far, but it still misses about half. I use a mail provider that has a pretty good spam filter, but even the mail coming through that has a lot more spam in it. The spammers are getting more and more clever at it.

Ditto. The stuff I've trained gets trashed but the spammers keep coming up with new stuff. I've tried blocking the sender and training the mail as spam but I still get more.

 

[Randy B. Singer]

The reason I said I don't care is that I don't want to muck with it any more. I spent hours and hours training SS to get it to that 70% level. I have other things to worry about and don't want to waste any more time on it.

Over-training SpamSieve is definitely possible. Instead of stubbornly continuing to over-train it, you might want to take ten minutes to call Michael Tsai at C-Command Software and let him guide you to fix things so that SpamSieve can get back to near 100% accuracy. I'd be shocked if the call and the fix took more than a total of 20 minutes.