Ask Jacob
How can I stop Spam coming to my Dot Mac account?
Wednesday, May 2, 2007 / Intel Macs, Mac OS 9 / Classic, Mac OS X
My main Dot Mac account is now receiving lots of spam after years of none. How can I reduce this without giving up subscription or changing address? None of the stuff is actually addressed to me! If I make a mistake in an address it doesn’t get through yet all this stuff does. Is it a matter for Apple and who should I contact?
Dot Mac has an effective Spam filter that catches much of the Spam sent daily. The problem is no matter how clever Apple is at filtering Spam, the senders of Spam are determined to get it to you. Their persistence is impossible to counter 100% of the time, and every so often they find a new way around Apple’s guard. What you are seeing could be the temporary success of the spammers. They will likely soon be caught and stopped, but it may take some action on your part as well. On the Dot Mac servers there are plenty of known Spam lists and special “intelligent” filters to look for Spam-like attributes. Mail that gets past those filters is then sent to your computer but not necessarily to you. Within the “Mail” application is additional Spam filtering tools. In the Mail Preferences is a “Junk Mail” section. There you can turn on filtering by checking the checkbox next to “Enable Junk mail filtering.” Work with the default settings for a little while and work to train the filters. “Mail” will learn about what you consider Spam and will start taking care of it automatically for you.
The reality is that we all get Spam, tons of it. Dot Mac just has been taking good care of it for the most part, but they can’t get it all the time. So lend Apple a hand and soon they will beat back the slimy Spammers. That is until Spammers find a new attack.
