Mail (Mountain Lion): If junk mail filters aren’t working correctly
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If Mail is incorrectly identifying junk mail, you can try various solutions.
If junk mail isn’t marked as junk
If junk mail isn’t highlighted in brown to indicate it’s junk, check your junk mail preferences.
- Choose Mail > Preferences, and then click Junk Mail. Make sure the “Enable junk mail filtering” and “Mark as junk mail, but leave it in my Inbox” checkboxes are both selected.
- If you chose the junk mail preference to exempt addresses in your Previous Recipients list from filtering, check that your list contains only addresses you want to receive messages from.
- If the problem persists, click Reset in Junk Mail preferences to reset the junk mail database to its original information. Resetting the database removes everything Mail has learned from you about what is junk or not junk, so you need to help Mail identify junk mail again.
If messages are incorrectly marked as junk
There are several ways you can prevent Mail from incorrectly marking legitimate messages as junk.
- Tell Mail that the messages are legitimate by marking them as not junk.
- Add the senders to Contacts.
- Review your Mail preferences for junk mail, as well as any rules you might have created to handle junk mail, and make changes as necessary.
Last Modified: Sep 4, 2015