Setting up .Mac Mail to mark junk mail automatically

You can set up .Mac Mail to automatically mark .Mac email that it thinks might be junk mail by enabling junk mail filtering. Once a message is marked as junk, you can also have it automatically placed in a Junk folder.

Note: Setting up .Mac Mail to mark messages as junk affects only messages sent to your .Mac email address.

To set up .Mac Mail to mark junk mail automatically and enable junk mail filtering:

  1. If you're not already in .Mac Mail on the web, go to www.mac.com, click Mail (along the top of the page), and then log in.
  2. Click the Preferences link in the upper-right corner.
  3. In the General pane, select the "Enable junk mail filtering" checkbox.

    If this checkbox is selected, .Mac Mail automatically marks messages in your inbox that it suspects are junk mail by color-coding the message brown and adding ".Mac thinks this message is Junk Mail" in the message header.

    If .Mac Mail mistakenly marks a message as junk, click the "Not junk" button in the email header to remove the color-coding.

  4. To have .Mac Mail automatically move any messages to a Junk folder, select the "Automatically move messages marked as junk to the Junk folder" checkbox.

    If you choose this option, be sure to check the Junk folder occasionally and delete messages you don't want to keep in order to free space on the mail server. Messages left in the Junk folder for more than 60 days are automatically deleted.

    If you've set up Mac OS X Mail to retrieve your .Mac email, you should also choose to move Mac OS X Mail junk messages to the Junk folder and to store Mac OS X Mail junk messages on the server (in Mac OS X Mail preferences). Otherwise, you may see two Junk folders in Mail. For instructions, open Mail (in your Applications folder), choose Help > Mail Help, and search for "junk mail."

Enabling junk mail filtering also allows you to manually mark messages as junk. For more information, search .Mac Help for "marking junk mail."