[X Newbies] Mail Rules

[Gretchen Hayman]

On Thursday, Jun 12, 2003, at 09:35 US/Central, Mark Des Cotes wrote:

> In the Rules prefs, the menu where you can choose "Message is junk 
> mail", is this telling Mail that the applicable messages are junk mail 
> and to color them, or is it saying IF the "Message is junk mail" color 
> them?

The "Message is junk" is the condition that has to be met, then the box 
below it ("color it brown") are where you tell Mail what actions to 
perform on mail that meet the conditions in the first box.  "Message is 
junk" is a vague way of saying "when Mail's built-in spam determination 
magic decides this is spam".  So, if mail determines they are junk, 
then color them.

> Is setting the color of a message to the default brown the same as 
> saying it's Junk?

No.  You could set all of your filters to color messages brown.  You 
could set your Junk filter to set color to fuschia, if you prefer.  :)

> I'm still in training mode. I've added a few specifications to the 
> "Junk" rule so that if the "To" field contains certain things the 
> message is Junk. The rule is working by coloring those instances but 
> the Junk icon doesn't appear next to the messages. Do I still have to 
> manually flag them as Junk?

Hmmm, that's interesting that it's doing one without the other.  No 
other rules coloring things brown?  Do you have the "any" or the "all" 
switch set on the top of the conditions box?  If you have "any" 
enabled, try switching to "all" and see if it correctly flags the 
messages.  But yes, if the junk icon isn't there, you need to train 
Mail's spam software by manually flagging junk.  You should also unflag 
non-junk, when false positives happen, so the software "learns".

> When I switch to Automatic, will these same messages be detected or 
> not?

By "these messages" do you mean the ones that are currently being 
colored but not flagged?  I would guess not, if it's not flagging them 
with junk icons right now.

A few things that have worked well for me, with my junk filtering 
(which is not 100%, but darned close):
- keep the junk filter last in your list; I'm pretty sure that Mail 
rules are first match wins
- I enabled the "Sender is not in my Address Book" condition to stop 
false positives from colleagues/friends whose e-mail was being caught
- I don't automatically throw Junk, as there are sometimes a few 
false-positives; I transfer to a "Spam" mailbox and quickly check once 
a day to make sure nothing important has been caught.

Anyway, hope this helps.  Have fun and enjoy Mail.  :)

gretchen