Maily maily moo, some questions for you

October 19, 2006 8:28 PM

Two quick Mail.app questions: How do I "whitelist" an address, and how do I get it to work behind a proxy

1) Mail.app's spam filter is a little aggressive. I often lose emails from my Ultimate captain, and from my VOIP's voicemail-email service. I tried writing a "rule" to move any message from certain senders to my inbox, but it didn't have the intended effect. Is there an easy way to make a "white list" of senders who are never filtered?

2) My work uses a proxy server for all internet traffic. Is there anyway to configure mail so that I can still download from Yahoo's Pop3 server, and send to yahoo's SMTP server?

Thanks in advance

posted by Popular Ethics to computers & internet (10 comments total)

maybe add them to the address book
posted by Rubbstone at 8:29 PM on October 19, 2006

Yeah, put them in your address book and then check the "person is in my address book" field in the Junk section of the preferences.

And...

Mail.app's spam filter is a little aggressive

You've got to be kidding. It's hands down the worst filter I've ever seen. Dozens of times a day I mark things as junk and then the filter lets the same message come in a few hours later.

I have no idea about your 2nd question.
posted by dobbs at 8:34 PM on October 19, 2006

The address book trick doesn't seem to be working. My Voip emails arrive from "phonebookname 905-555-555 ". the phonebookname and number are different for each message, and just adding the unrepliable address to my address book doesn't seem to convince mail. Any other suggestions?
posted by Popular Ethics at 8:55 PM on October 19, 2006

i think the junk mail handling is actually handled by one very complex rule. look in preferences->junk->advanced.

you should be able to add to the junk rule there to at least fix the problem with your ultimate captain. something like "sender does not contain "

as for the voip rule, that's kind of a hard one. is there any part of the voip email header that's common? like a subject line?
posted by joeblough at 9:07 PM on October 19, 2006

Have you tried clicking on the "Not Junk" button on the VOIP e-mail messages that Mail has marked as junk mail? If you are consistent about correcting every mistake, then, in theory, Mail is supposed to eventually learn that they're not junk mail.

With regards to proxies, as of System 10.4.7 Mail.app supports connecting to mail servers through a SOCKS proxy. You can configure your proxy settings in System Preferences -> Network -> Configure -> Proxies.
posted by RichardP at 9:13 PM on October 19, 2006

My terminology will not be correct, because I'm using Mail.app in Dutch. Anyway; when I open the Junk filter preferences, there's an "Advanced" button. It lists:
When all of the following conditions are met:

* sender is not in my address book
* blah blah
* mail is junk

Then

* Move the message to junk

Just add a line to the "When" conditions that says
* sender DOES NOT contain "phonebookname".. (or whatever that matches your voicemail service.. I believe you can even filter on headers)
posted by lodev at 2:23 AM on October 20, 2006

Have you tried clicking on the "Not Junk" button on the VOIP e-mail messages that Mail has marked as junk mail? If you are consistent about correcting every mistake, then, in theory, Mail is supposed to eventually learn that they're not junk mail.

You would think. But it hasn't learned yet.

As for the proxy. I have tried setting the Socks Proxy, but either Mail doesn't know to use it, or something else is being blocked. Sigh.
posted by Popular Ethics at 7:03 AM on October 20, 2006

so dobbs says it first, then i says it, and then lodev gets best answer!? oh ask.mefi, thou art so cruel.
posted by joeblough at 8:06 AM on October 20, 2006

No slight intended joeblough. Dobbs mentioned the address book trick, which wasn't working in my case. And I bested your answer (which I missed, but which is equally as complete as lodev's.)
posted by Popular Ethics at 8:48 AM on October 20, 2006

no big deal, i was just being a whiner. mornings can do that to a guy.
posted by joeblough at 11:31 AM on October 20, 2006