19.6. The Anti-Spam Toolkit

19.6. The Anti-Spam Toolkit Spam, the junk that now makes up more than 80 percent of email, is a problem thats only getting worse. Luckily, you, along with Mails advanced spam filters
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19.6. The Anti-Spam Toolkit 19.6. The Anti-Spam ToolkitSpam, the junk that now makes up more than 80 percent of email, is a problem thats onlygetting worse. Luckily, you, along with Mails advanced spam filters, can make itbetter—at least for your email accounts.19.6.1. Using the Junk Mail FilterYoull see the effects of Mails spam filter the first time you check your mail: A certainswath of message titles appears in color. These are the messages that Mail considers junk.Note: Out of the box, Mail doesnt apply its spam-targeting features to people whoseaddresses are in your address book, to people youve emailed recently, or to messagessent to you by name rather than just by email address. You can adjust these settings inMail Preferences Junk Mail tab.During your first couple of weeks with Mail, your job is to supervise Mails coloring job.That is, if you get spam that Mail misses, click the message, and then click the Junkbutton at the top of its window (identified in Figure 19-5), or the Junk icon on the toolbar.On the other hand, if Mail flags legitimate mail as spam, slap it gently on the wrist byclicking the Not Junk button. Over time, Mail gets better and better at filtering your mail;it even does surprisingly well against the new breed of image only spam.The trouble with this so-called Training mode is that youre still left with the task oftrashing the spam yourself, saving you no time whatsoever.Once Mail has perfected its filtering skills to your satisfaction, though, open Mailspreferences, click Junk Mail, and click Move it to the Junk mailbox. From now on,Mail automatically files what it deems junk into a Junk mailbox, where its much easier toscan and delete the messages en masse.Tip: Dont miss the Trust Junk Mail headers set by your Internet Service Provideroption in the Junk Mail pane of the preference window. If you turn on that checkbox,Mail takes your ISPs word that certain messages are spam, giving you a double layer ofspam protection.19.6.2. More Anti-Spam TipsThe Junk filter goes a long way toward cleaning out the spam from your mailcollection—but it doesnt catch everything. If youre overrun by spam, here are someother steps you can take: • Dont let the spammers know youre there.You choose Mail Preferences, click Viewing, and turn off Display remote images in HTML messages. This option saves you time, because graphics are big and slow to download. It also shields you from unexpected free samples of pornographers wares. But it also thwarts a common spammer tactic by blocking graphics that appear to be embedded into a message, but are actually retrieved from a Web site somewhere. Spammers use that embedded-graphics trick to know that their message has fallen on fertile ground—a live sucker who actually looks at these messages—but with that single preference switch, you can fake them out. • Rules. Set up some message rules, as described on Section 19.5.14, that autoflag messages as spam that have subject lines containing trigger words like Viagra, Herbal, Mortgage,Refinance,Enlarge,Your—you get the idea. • Create a private account. If youre overrun by spam, consider sacrificing your address to the public areas of the Internet, like chat rooms, online shopping, Web site and software registration, and newsgroup posting. Spammers use automated software robots that scour every public Internet message and Web page, recording email addresses they find. (In fact, thats probably how they got your address in the first place.) Using this technique, at least youre now restricting the junk mail to one, secondary mail account. Reserve a separate email account for person-to-person email.Here are some suggestions for avoiding landing on spammers lists in the first place: • Dont ask for it. When filling out forms online, turn off the checkboxes that say, Yes, send me exciting offers and news from our partners. • Fake out the robots. When posting messages in a newsgroup or message board, insert the letters NOSPAM somewhere into your email address. Anyone replying to you via email must delete the NOSPAM from your email address, which is a slight hassle. Meanwhile, though, the spammers software robots will lift a bogus email address from your online postings. TROUBLESHOOTING MOMENT Rebuilding Your Mail Databases As noted earlier in this chapter, Mail keeps your messages in a series of mailbox database files in your Home Library Mail folder. Over time, as you add and delete hundreds of messages from these database files, some digital sawdust gets left behind, resulting in peculiarities when addressing messages or general Mail sluggishness. You also wind up with massive message files hidden on your hard drive, which can consume hundreds of megabytes of disk space. Thats a particular bummer if you like to copy your message databases to your laptop when you go on a trip. Fortunately, its easy enough to rebuild the message data-bases. Doing so cleanses, repairs, and purges your message files. As a result, you wind up with a much more compact and healthy database. To rebuild a mailbox, highlight it in the Mailboxes column in Mail. (Highlight several by -clicking, if you like.) Then choose Mailbox Rebuild. Mac OS X takes several minutes (or hours, depending on the size of your mailboxes) to repair and compact your database—but if youre experiencing Mail weirdness or slowness, its well worth the sacrifice. • • Never reply to spam. Doing so identifies your email ad ...