Junk Mail - Stops Filtering After A While

In theory, the filter should get better with more training, not worse, but there is always the possibility that spammers are getting better at mimicking legitimate email in an effort to trick the filters. For instance, I used to get junk that included a paragraph or two of nonsense, apparently to look more legit to adaptive filters. Now I see many with actual passages from novels or other human-authored sources, which may be more effective.

I've also read about academic experiments that sort of reverse the purpose of an adaptive filter to generate "spammy" content to fool its normal version. Supposedly, this works but is very labor intensive. If some spammers have figured out a way to do something like this, some spam may appear even more like legit email to filters than would be obvious, & may degrade the filter in some way if taught such 'nearly legit' messages are junk.

I have no idea how effective this might be against Apple's specific filter, but you might try not 'over training' the filter for a while & see if you get better results.

This is weird. Has this happened more than once after resetting the junk filter? Could it be that you're getting a different kind of junk now that Mail has more trouble with? Could it be that you sometimes mistakenly mark some junk messages as not junk?

Wow, that one really assumes I got no neurons left doesn't it?

No, it doesn't. It's not unlikely that you want to mark a junk message as read, or delete it, and type the wrong keystrokes, or click the wrong button by mistake. It has certainly happened to me.

So now what?

I really don't know. The only way to "fix" this I know of would be to reset the junk filter ( Preferences > Junk Mail > Reset), but I have no idea what might cause the problem to start happening again, nor how to permanently fix it.

You may want to try other spam-fighting solutions:

http://www.hawkwings.net/plugins.htm#spam