Mail is Marking Junk Mail -- but it's turned off

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Mail is Marking Junk Mail -- but it's turned off

MacBook Air, High Sierra 10.13.6, Apple Mail 11.5. All known updates and patches have been installed.

I have turned "Enable Junk Mail Filtering" OFF in Mail=>Preferences but Mail continues to mark messages as "Junk" and move them to the Junk Mail folder. This is happening on mail from multiple services, including one Mac.com account, two Exchange accounts, and two IMAP accounts.

I have checked the cpanel on the server which hosts the IMAP accounts, and there is no spam/junk mail filtering enabled there.

I am using Spam Sieve to catch suspect mail, and anything that it catches goes to the "spam" folder, not to Junk Mail folder.

All messages in the Junk Mail folder are in a light brown color, which I understand to be the color of a message caught by Apple Mail's junk filter.

How do I turn off the Junk Mail filter if the "Enable..." button is already unchecked? Is there a "default.write..." terminal command I can use to stop this?

MacBook Air, macOS High Sierra (10.13.6), Asus 27" monitor

Posted on Oct 18, 2018 3:13 PM

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Answer 1

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Barney-15E

Level 10

116,236 points

Oct 19, 2018 8:10 AM in response to Peter Jones4

iCloud (mac.com) has its own spam filter. It has never been integrated with Mail, but maybe they have finally done that.

You can check to see by accessing your email via iCloud.com. If new messages are in the Junk folder, and when you open Mail, check to see if they are marked as Junk. If they are, that may be why.

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Answer 2

Peter Jones4 Author

Level 1

102 points

Oct 19, 2018 8:21 AM in response to Barney-15E

Thank you for the reply. This helped me get closer to the real issue. I realized that the vast majority of the "junk" messages are coming into two accounts -- one is iCloud/Mac.com, the other an Exchange account which I use in my work for a national nonprofit organization. The Mac.com junk is, for the most part, truly junk. The Exchange account is marking internal (and important) messages which, when I don't get them, causes some disruption.

In both cases the mail is being filtered by the server, not by Apple Mail. The other accounts (two IMAP accounts and another Exchange account for a consulting client) are not doing any junk filtering -- that's being handled locally (within Apple Mail) by Spam Sieve.

I have written to the admin of the Exchange account to get this worked on. Will see how it plays out. In the meantime, thanks for the good and helpful tip.

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Mail is Marking Junk Mail -- but it's turned off

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