Automatically junk spam messages with images

Mon 26 Feb 07 21:23 | Tags: Guides, Mac

I use Apple's standard Mail client for my email. It has a built-in spam filter, but unfortunately, the filter doesn't quite seem smart enough at filtering out spam messages where the sales pitch is located in an image attached to the message, as is increasingly common nowadays, instead of in text in the body of the email. However, I've found a simple way to make sure that these spam messages don't make it into my inbox. I'll show you how. It should be applicable to most other email clients as well.

The trick lies in the fact that the images attached to these junk mail messages are invariably in the GIF image format, and that Mail lets us filter messages based on the filenames of attachments. So we're going to create a "rule" (other email clients call this a "filter") that will automatically move a message to the Junk folder if it contains an attachment which has a filename ending in ".gif". To do this:

This is how the new rule should look.

From inside Mail, select "Preferences…" from the Mail menu.
From the toolbar at the top, select "Rules."
Click the "Add Rule" button at the right.
This window can be a bit confusing, so I'll just show you an image of how it should look. Note that the full name of the "Any Attahment Na" menu item is "Any Attachment Name;" that's a bit long, so OS X is truncating it when the menu isn't open. If you want the message to be moved to another folder besides the Junk folder, feel free to change that part. Click "OK" when you're done.
Mail will ask you if you want to "apply your rules to messages in open mailboxes." Go ahead and click "Yes."
Close the Preferences window.

That does it. Now, whenever you get a message with a GIF attached, it will automatically be moved to the Junk folder, even if Mail's standard spam filtering algorithms don't think it's spam. Note that this won't work for all images, so whenever my aunt sends me family photos via email, Mail doesn't junk them because those images will be in JPEG format. I've yet to have this method register a false positive. There is one oddity, though; if Mail checks your mail and finds nothing but spam, it won't notify you. If it downloads any messages that it doesn't think are spam, however, it will notify you, even if those messages aren't in your inbox. So sometimes Mail will download a message which will be sent to my Junk folder by this rule, then make its "new mail" noise. But when I switch to the program, there's actually no new mail in my inbox. I think that's a minor annoyance, though, compared to the major annoyance of all those manhood enhancement and investment opportunity messages that were slipping through.

Get more great Ray Gun Robot content sent directly to your feed reader or email inbox! Subscribe today!
Articles & Links — Via Email
Articles Only — Via Email