MobileMe E-mail: Junk Filter Can’t Be Turned Off
Since Apple recently updated MobileMe, I’ve spotted something a bit disturbing. I use my MobileMe account for some of my e-mail, and I was noticing that some messages to mailing lists weren’t coming through. When I looked on the web, I noticed that some of those messages were trapped in the Junk folder. Since I access my MobileMe account via POP, I wasn’t seeing these messages on my Mac. But most of what was flagged as junk was not spam. I had to manually tell MobileMe, for each message, that this was the case.
When I looked in the preferences – where I had previous turned off junk mail filtering – I found that there is no such option any more. This is disturbing; I don’t want my mail filtered on a server where I cannot access it the way I get my mail (POP; if I used IMAP, I would indeed see a Junk folder). If you use a MobileMe account and access your mail via POP, you should check regularly to see what’s been blocked.
This is a bad feature; Apple should clearly restore the option allowing junk mail filtering to be turned off.
I would recommend using IMAP anyway. It’s far superior (it actually syncs your account).
Also, screening your spam folder manually doesn’t really take that long. You can pretty much see at a glance at a list of messages if they contain anything that isn’t spam or not.
I never really got IMAP.
As for the Junk folder, the problem is that I have to go to the web to check it. Something I never had to do before.
If you use Apple Mail with IMAP, it’s pretty easy to set the Mail junk folder to be the same as the IMAP junk folder. Just select the IMAP folder and choose “Use This Mailbox For” in the Mailbox menu. Then you can review your junk mail right in Mail.app. At least, it works in Gmail. You might have to setup the junk mail to be an IMAP folder in MobileMe, as you do for Gmail.
Switching to IMAP from POP is pretty easy too. Just set up a new account in Mail. Most likely, it will use IMAP by default. I think you can even use both at the same time without any problems, to see what you like.
Switching to IMAP won’t help too much – I’ve been using IMAP since the beginning, but I don’t have the Mail.app’s Junk filter set anywhere. Yet, every few days, a Junk folder appears in my .mac [mobileme] folder collection, usually with some ham, not spam. Since I keep my .mac folder collection compressed most of the time, I don’t see the new additional folder that’s been added. The weird thing is that I don’t keep the web interface open at all. I do pick up my .mac mail with my iPad and iPhone in addition to my Mac. All Macs that pick up the .mac mail don’t have Junk filtering on.
IMAP, however, is the better protocol to use in general. It is a lot more stable than POP. But it won’t solve the Junk folder randomly appearing with ham in it. :(
/vjl/
My point was that IMAP would let you screen your junk messages in Mail, as opposed to having to go to the website to do it.
Actually, I have found that Mail’s built in junk filter can sometimes grab false negatives that Gmail’s spam filter misses, though the way it is set up, it never does the reverse.