How do I whitelist email addresses in Mail.app to prevent from being flagged as spam?

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saghi Author

Level 1

43 points

How do I whitelist email addresses in Mail.app to prevent from being flagged as spam?

I have two questions that are closely related.

Clicking “Not Junk” on a message in the junk folder seems to have no effect at all.
Is there an element I’m not understanding, or maybe I’m missing something all together?
I’d like to figure out how to get “Not Junk” to work, or find a way to whitelist certain addresses.
I’ve seen the method about adding a rule to move a message to another folder before junk can catch it, but it only works about 50% of the time, and regardless, that's such a hack; I’d like a more solid, reliable method, if one exists.
Why is it that some messages end up in my junk box, yet they’re not marked as junk?
In other words, the message preview isn’t lighter text like it is for all other junk messages (it's solid black, like all regular messages), and when viewing the message, I don’t see the “Load Remote Content” and “Not Junk” buttons.
It seems like Mail.app didn’t flag it as junk, yet for some reason it’s in my junk folder anyway.

Any insight on either of these questions is appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

I have two Mac's connecting to all my email (a 2006 Mac Pro with El Capitan, and a 2012 MacBook Pro with Mojave), also an iPhone 7 Plus, and two iPads, all the latest iOS version...incase that info is useful.

Posted on Nov 11, 2018 7:58 AM

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Answer 1

Eric Root

Level 10

685,215 points

Nov 11, 2018 10:19 AM in response to saghi

Try going to Mail/Preferences/Junk Mail and click the Reset button at the bottom. You will have to retrain the filter, but it may fix the problem of no apparent effect.

Messages that end up in the Junk Mail folder and aren't brown/tan were probably marked as junk mail by your email provider. Go to their web site, access your account, and see if you can adjust the filters there.

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Answer 2

Camelot

Level 9

58,257 points

Nov 11, 2018 10:19 AM in response to Eric Root

Messages that end up in the Junk Mail folder and aren't brown/tan were probably marked as junk mail by your email provider. Go to their web site, access your account, and see if you can adjust the filters there.

This is almost certainly the case. In addition to Mail.app's own junk detection, mail providers can also flag mail as suspicious, and Mail.app will honor that.

You may be able to see this by checking the message's full headers by selecting a message, then choosing View -> Message -> Full Headers (although the headers themselves might need some decoding).

Other things to try are creating a contact with the corresponding email address, or creating a rule that filters the messages to your InBox.

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Answer 3

saghi Author

Level 1

43 points

Nov 11, 2018 10:20 AM in response to Eric Root

Thank you, I'll give that a try and see how it goes. (Clicking the Reset button)

And yeah, that makes a lot of sense that maybe my email provider is moving suspected spam into my junk box. I don't mind, it's just nice to know why that's happening, and I think you're right.

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Answer 4

Eric Root

Level 10

685,215 points

Nov 11, 2018 10:23 AM in response to saghi

You are welcome.

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How do I whitelist email addresses in Mail.app to prevent from being flagged as spam?

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