Mac OS X Mail and Spam

Tuesday, 2006-08-01; 01:14:00


Image spam is getting through Mail's bayesian filter

Grr. Mail has suddenly started to refuse to identify obvious spam messages as spam. 75% of the time, it's a spam message that includes this image:

Spam E-mail Message

Does anybody know a way to devise a Mail rule to automatically route this message to the spam box (assuming you've been getting this message as well)? I can't seem to do it, because the "content" attribute of a mail message doesn't seem to match HTML source in the message; I suspect it only matches plain text, and the plain text in these e-mails is always changing -- it's the image and some parts of the HTML source that are always the same.

I had to manually mark about 30 of these messages as spam, which is when I lost it. I went to [Mail --> Preferences... --> Junk Mail --> Reset...] and reset the junk mail database. I also made sure the LSMMap2 file inside ~/Library/Mail/ was deleted (which is where the junk mail database resides, IIRC). But now Mail is letting in all sorts of spam, which still includes the one above after "training" it a couple of times. I may just be impatient, but I recall Mail being much more smart at flagging most of these messages than it is right now, even when untrained. (In hindsight, it probably would have been a good idea to keep a backup copy of LSMMap2 around, but oh well. I have one from August last year, though.)

Does anybody have any tips on how to improve Mail's junk filtering accuracy? How about just for routing the above spam message to the Junk mail folder? -- that alone would make me much less aggravated.


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