Mac OS X includes Mail, a robust and highly customizable email program with support for POP, IMAP, and Exchange. It’s always had a very good junk mail filter that’s easy and intuitive to set up.
When you fire up Mail and configure it for the first time, you’ll notice some of your messages appear in your inbox in an amber typeface. This color means Mail thinks the message is junk. If a message is wrongly tagged as junk, you can click once on it and then press the “not junk” button in the toolbar. Conversely, if something gets by the filter, you can click once on it and then press the junk button in the toolbar.
When you feel that Mail is adequately filtering out the junk, you can take it out of this training mode by going to Preferences in the Mail menu on top of your screen. Click Junk Mail in the Preferences window toolbar and select the appropriate option in the “When junk mail arrives…” section.
I receive several hundred emails every day, and send quite a few, too; I spent a fair amount of time training my junk filter when I started at Small Dog about four years ago, and continue to tweak the filter’s performance by marking messages that get past.
I recently made the choice to wipe my computer clean and selectively rebuild my configuration from my backup. Like anyone else, my computer tends to accumulate crap, and it’s nice to have a fresh start now and again. One thing I did not want to do is re-train my junk mail filter. I didn’t mind re-doing my rules, but the meticulous marking of junk mail over the years is priceless.
Turns out it is very simple to preserve your hard work. Simply copy com.apple.mail.plist from ~/Library/Preferences on your backup into the same spot on your restored or new computer. This has the delightful side effect of preserving all of your settings.