Remove filtered spam from mail servers in Mail.app

Apr 22, '02 09:16:36AM

Contributed by: robg

I recently began receiving a lot of "stock alert" spam. The mail always started with "(OTCBB:", so I added a new rule in Mail.app to delete any email that contained that string in the subject line. Since I was 100% positive I would never receive a valid email with that string in the subject, the only rule option I enabled was "Delete the message". This seemed to work perfectly, as the spam stopped immediately, and I had been getting a few every week.

Over the weekend, I was logged in to the macosxhints.com host machine working on some stuff, and ran the command line "mail" program when I saw a "You have new mail in ..." message appear. Not only did I see the new message in the UNIX mail program, but I was somewhat surprised to also find three "(OTCBB:" messages sitting there.

These had apparently been filtered from my downloaded mail, as I had never seen them in Mail.app, but they were still on the server. Their status in the "mail" program indicated that they had been read, so Mail.app had acted on them. But they had never actually been deleted from the server, just from my local machine.

As an experiment, I sent myself a few "spam" email with various filter settings. After a few tries, I found that the solution was to also enable Transfer to mailbox and set Deleted Messages as the destination folder. This did the trick - a test email sent with the filtered subject never appeared in Mail.app (oddly enough, not even in Deleted Messages!), but was successfully removed from the server.

So if you have some high-volume spam filters in place and have only enabled the "Delete the message" option within rules, you might want to take a look at your mail server to see if all spam messages have been cleared. An easy way to do this without using the command line is to simply disable your spam rules and download your mail again -- anything that was sitting on the server will be downloaded to your inbox.

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