Filter junk mail
RIT recognizes that junk mail is a problem, and a difficult one to solve at that. We do try to prevent junk mail from reaching your inbox in the first place, but it is not entirely possible to eliminate all junk mail while preserving legitimate messages for everyone on the campus mail systems.
Mac OS X
In Mac OS X, both Apple Mail and Microsoft Entourage provide built-in means to filter junk mail. Because this filtering happens on your e-mail client, you have more control over it and it becomes more personalized to your mail usage. This can increase the effectiveness of the filters.
We provide the following information about these applications:
- "Apple Mail Junk Mail filter", available in Mac OS X 10.2 "Jaguar" and later
- Microsoft Entourage Junk Mail Filter, available in Microsoft Entourage v.X and later (each major version updates the filter significantly, based on the Microsoft SmartScreen technology also used in Microsoft Exchange, Outlook, and Hotmail).
They work similarly when set up, by:
- Marking an identified message as junk automatically (or manually, if necessary), including color coding it for visual identification
- Moving the message to a "junk mail" folder
- Preventing pictures linked or embedded in the message from being loaded in your e-mail application.
Both products tend to work quite well in our experience, catching a significant amount of junk mail. A few common points that will help you work with them:
- Mark messages as junk using the built-in buttons or menu commands whenever possible.
- Apple Mail's Junk Mail Filter learns, using statistical and artificial intelligence techniques, from what you mark as junk to improve its effectiveness in the future.
- When you mark messages as junk, Microsoft Entourage's Junk Mail Filter removes the address for the sender of each message from your list of recently-used addresses. This helps keep your recently-used address list -- a useful feature that helps you quickly address new messages -- as clean as possible. However, Microsoft Entourage's filter is not a learning one in the same sense that Apple Mail's is.
- Add people you normally converse with to your address book to help the junk mail filter avoid filtering messages from them. Also add mailing lists and legitimate Web sites and vendors you work with to your address book, for the same reason.
- Review the application's "junk mail" folder periodically to make sure the filter is not removing legitimate e-mail.
- Once you have become comfortable with the junk mail filtering, you can begin telling the program to automatically remove marked junk mail messages after a few days. Continue to review your "junk mail" folder to watch for false positives.
Classic Mac OS
The choices in "Mac OS classic" are less clear. If you cannot upgrade to Mac OS X, you may wish to use Microsoft Entourage 2001, which contains an earlier version of the Microsoft Junk Mail Filter. Newer versions in Microsoft Entourage v.X and 2004 are likely to be more effective.