I hate spam.

I mean, I really really hate spam…

And due to this I spend a borderline insane amount of time creating filters, building heuristic systems, and blocking entire countries to keep my personal email junk-free. Which is great if you own your own mail server, but harder if you use mail services offered by other companies…

For example, I’ve had Apple’s email service since early 2000 – when Apple released iTools. And because of this I have an @mac.com email address (and me.com and icloud.com) I keep around for historical reasons. But Apple isn’t as on the ball as I am with regard to spam, so I periodically have to find inventive ways to stem the tide when some 20+ year old email list gets put back into service.

First I have to point out that from a filtering point of view, Apple is really good. I pretty much never find offending penis enlargement emails in my inbox, but the junk mail box will usually show 50-60 items each morning during a spam storm – and that bugs me.

Apple users tend to get spammed by farms that send millions of junk emails per hour, and it generally takes Apple a week or two to figure out the domain lighting them up is 110% garbage and block the domain. But, if you don’t want to deal with the noise for that week or two, here’s the fix:

Okay – Log into iCloud and go to Apple Mail.

First, figure out the domain; this can be done by clicking on a few offending emails so that they open in the view window and clicking on the arrow next to the sender’s name. The domain will be something like spammer.org or junkmail.com. You’ll probably notice that most of them are coming from one particular domain – make note of this.

From there click on the little gear icon above the mail box list and go to preferences.

From the preferences window, click on “rules” in the left panel and then in the right window click on “add rule” – this will change the dialog in the right window to the rules panel.

You’ll see two inputs here: the upper one will have a drop down that says “is from” – put the domain in the box under this. The lower section will also have a drop down, click it and select “move to trash and mark as read”.

Now click “add” and then “done”.

Congratulations! Everything coming from that particular spam cannon will now automagically go straight to trash and be marked as read so you won’t even know about it.

I recommend checking your domain-level round-file rules once a month or so to see if they’re still needed. Apple will eventually get around to blocking them, and then you won’t need it.

Listening to "Synthetic" by The Midnight