Hi Beth,
On Jul 30, 2024, at 09:02, Beth Phillips via groups.io <beth.phillips@...> wrote:
Hi Bill,
You can check for blocked senders here: Mail/Settings, click Junk Mail, then click Blocked.
For whatever reason, all the blocked email addresses turn out to be the phone numbers which I've blocked over the years as being robocalls. Strange.
Have you installed any Apple updates to your computer lately?
Not that I know of, but still...
You may check the Mail/Settings/Junk Mail behavior settings to see if anything there could have changed with a recent update or be affecting spam behavior. Here¡¯s some info on the filter settings. (Make sure to select the appropriate OS version at the top of the page to find info for your specific situation.)
The strange thing is that at a time long ago in a universe far, far away, I had my settings as
Enable junk mail filtering
When junk mail arrives, mark it as junk mail but leave it in my inbox
Nothing else is checked
So... one would think that nothing should ever end up in the Junk Mail emailbox. The only problem is that the iPhone seems to do its own Junk Mail filtering.
If you are using a third-party mail service such as Gmail, Yahoo, etc. it may be they¡¯ve changed something in how they filter spam that is causing the issue before it even gets to your Apple Mail.
Hmm... this is worth a check, because I have a forwarding email address at my alma mater. This should not affect anything, and it apparently doesn't, as some of the junk mail is addressed to the forwarding address, and some directed direcly to my dot mac account. Others are directed to email addresses which are the equivalent of 'mac.com' like 'me.com'. So... no pattern there.
If you have more than one Apple device handling your email (iPhone, iPad, laptop) make sure your settings are the same across devices.
For the life of me, I cannot find anytbing for my iPhone which regulates junk mail.
If you also use a third-party mail program such as Outlook for the same email account, it could be something in the Outlook settings is doing the filtering. (I had this happen when I was using Mail on my iPhone and Outlook on my laptop for the same account.)
I've managed to get myself limited to just Apole Mail.
My Mom had an issue a few years back where her Apple Mail suddenly started blocking messages sent to her from my home account as spam. I never could find out what was causing it. She only used Mail on her desktop computer, and I could find nothing that showed my address as being blocked in Mail or with her mail service provider. I ended up setting up a filter in Mail to direct all my messages to a specific folder that she could go check which circumvented the Junk folder. Earlier this year I got her a new computer, restored everything from her Time Machine back up, and low and behold, my messages started coming through again and I was able to do away with the filter/folder. It remains one of life¡¯s great mysteries. Hopefully you won¡¯t have to go through all that and it¡¯s something simple, like just unblocking the address.
I wish it were. I've checked my iCloud email filters (which are useful because they get invoked before any device-dependent rules get invoked, but which are a pita, because they cannot be searched). I'll just keep plodding along trying to remember to check my Junk emailbox more regularly.
Still, thanks for all the pointers. It was worthwhile to check out the settings.
Bill
