Strategy for old mails in SPAM (auto-learning) folder?
I currently have about 850 messages in my fastmail spam folder.
There were times I kept all of them (> 5k ?), but because of inbox size issues I had to clean it about a year ago. Again, I would like that my spam folder doesn't grow to large (by deleting messages), but still is effective in spam filtering (using the fastmail auto-learning feature). Is there a particularly good strategy to keep the size of my spam folder under control? Just remove the ones that are over a year old? Or maybe the learning is even more effective if I just keep the ones that are e.g. maximum 6 months old, so more recent spam message relatively weight more in the whole personal spam "database"? |
Keeping the learned spam messages under a year old is actually an excellent approach. It should be quite sufficient to tune your personal Bayes database (should it ever need to be reset) and using the advanced preferences for a folder, you can set an auto purge limit of 365 days. Note that (although I doubt it will be that important) if you do decide a particular message is important to keep, you can pin the message to prevent auto purge from discarding it.
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thx, good tip.
i've enable the 365 days purging |
How the spam filter really works
Leaving messages in the Spam folder does not affect spam filtering! I think you misunderstand how the Fastmail spam filtering system and personal Bayes database work. Refer to this section of the Fastmail help:
https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/stopspam.html Until you get >200 spam and >200 non-spam messages reported, your personal Bayes database does not operate. Messages are reported to the Bayes database as follows:
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Wow, thanks Bill.
Ind-dept explanation. The "user flow which is best" was very useful. I am adapting my flow already |
Yeah ... I was confused about this until I re-read the latest help. I now understand the trap Fastmail is worried we might get into if we mark the Spam folder as learn-as-spam. So they now don't learn messages as spam unless you do one of these things:
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Bill how do we reset the filter (Spam count) there is no delete or Zero button.
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Bill |
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However, I've had my Spam folder set as learning spam for years, and haven't really had any problems with it. Part of the reason for me is that I primarily use Apple Mail so it's just an easier way to deal with getting stuff taught as spam — I very rarely use the web interface. I also strongly suspect that FastMail won't recognize deletion of mails from the spam folder via IMAP —*probably also not surprising since most IMAP clients will do a move-to-trash rather than an expunge. I realize I could point Apple Mail to use any arbitrary folder as its own "Junk Mail" folder, but again, I haven't really had a problem and I don't relish the idea of having two spam folders :) In my case, however, I've also set several other folders to learn "not-spam," including my Inbox and Archive folders. So in the event that something does get into a false positive loop, I could very well be misunderstanding how the Bayes training works, but I've always assumed the process of moving it back to the Inbox or Archive folders would effectively reverse the spam training for that message the next time those folders are scanned. Further, since I check my Inbox every single day and the scanning only occurs on a cycle, there doesn't seem to be a high risk of false negatives (e.g. learning spam messages as legit) from having that set as a not-spam training folder — chances are anything that lands in there that's spam will be dealt with before the next FastMail scan of that folder. Now, all of that having been said, I should note that I've been at this for a very long time with FastMail, so my Bayes database numbers for both spam and non-spam are into the tens of thousands. It might be a very different scenario for somebody who is just getting started. |
Here's something else from FastMail's Improving Spam Protection help article that I didn't realize (emphasis mine):
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Even though I haven't really been having any serious problems with my spam filtering, all of this is making me rethink my approach.... particularly useful is the knowledge that the spam training database gets updated when a message is expunged from the spam folder, even with auto-purge. |
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Neil. |
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