Law Students

Apple Mail Spam Accuracy

By Erik Schmidt

I’ve been getting a fair amount of spam lately. I have five email accounts that I use regularly, and three of them are linked to from various places online, so I’m hauling in over 200 spam messages a day on average. I use Apple’s Mail application for all five accounts. For the heck of it I decided to pay attention over a 24 hour period to how accurately the Mail.app spam filter operated.

Here are the results:

• 189 total messages
• 149 messages correctly classified as spam
• 38 messages correctly classified as legitimate mail
• 2 spam messages incorrectly classified as legitimate mail
• 0 false positives

So out of 189 messages, Mail got it right all but two times. 99% accuracy. I do have 8 or 9 rules I’ve put in over the course of the last two or three years, to cover such favorites as Bvlgari, male enhancement, and variations on I am bored. So Mail does require a little help from time to time, but it seems to be holding up rather well to the spam onslaught. Has your experience been similar?

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Full post as published by Mac Law Students on January 28, 2008 (boomark / email).