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Merely highlighting a Message in the InBox is an affirmative answer?
There's no "affirmative answer" as such. But highlighting it does make it appear in some form of window in Mail, right? It make no difference how much of it is displayed. The point is, if you have "
remote images" set to display, that sends a message to the SPAMmers server to send the message. All messages such as that are recorded on any server. Whether the SPAMmer makes use of that recorded fact is unknown, but why take the chance? Turn off "display r
emote images" in Mails prefs.
This is sometimes referred to as displaying html. However, it is not quite the same. All this setting does is to tell Mail to disregard any html tag to display an image that includes a URL to where the image is actually stored. Even with this setting Unchecked, you will still have the "privilege" of wasting time and bits to view the useless html formatting that often obscures the whole point of any message—to convey a message. But, if you like pretty colors, irrelevant text styles and boxes, that's up to you. Apple provides no way to turn that junk off in Mail.
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Are you issuing a blanket warning that to do anything, anything at all, with an "inhabitant" of your Inbox (even Highlight––>Delete) will set off an alarm in SpamCentralCommand?
If you can highlight tow or more messages at once, you'll not see either/any of them actually displayed. However, the only efficient way of doing that that I know of is to have a Spam/Junk mailbox set up for them. In order to get a message into that mailbox, of course, one needs a rule for Mail or a corpus built by SPAMsieve to be working. Actually, you can also simply have that mailbox automatically trashed/emptied on a schedule period of time.
"Opening" any message is accomplished by selecting its row in whatever list it's in. That's simply how it works, in Mail, anyway. The only control you have is to turn off the display of
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Then, pray tell, how – on the first occasion of receiving such mail – does the unwary recipient tell if its a spam scam, or, say, an invitation to his 65th high school reunion, chaired by a classmate who's been married 3 times and has no readily recognizable surname.
Well, certainly not by reading/displaying it!
I would suggest creating a rule, with several conditions, that safely confirm it is a valid message. Don't forget to include positive attributes, also. Nor will this protect you from SPAM coming from your Windows using HS 'friends' who don't use/update their anti-virus software.
Or...
You could just train SPAMsieve...
Another way is to use one of the many aliases available from most every email provider. Simply give those you want to hear from one of your aliases and note who has it. When you start getting SPAM to that address, simply delete it, create a new one and send it to those "friends" that had the old one...and remind them to update their anti-virus software and, more importantly, use it.
Or...
You could just train SPAMsieve...
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How does [SPAMsieve] figure-out how to sift the HS Reunion invites from the appeals of "altruistic" Nigerian bankers?
Simply put, by using heuristics. All Mail does is follow the rules that the user meticulously builds. That great for grouping messages with common traits such as the senders address, to...well, you can read the conditions available in the Mail->Rules list. But the items listed are not always the same in SPAM. The sender is hardly ever the same, same for the subject, words in the body, etc. That's why it's more efficient to let the computer do the 'rule creation.' And that's exactly what SPAMsieve does. Sure, it will probably include the from address, assuming it is not already in its database, but it will also look for the structure of the message (what words are used where, which words are misspelled and how, etc.) and many other things. Need I remind you that it will be king this at a close to the clock speed of your cpu?
Or that its algorthyms are updated often? Or that it does its thing without actually opening the message? What's not to like?
I forgot the actual procedure SPAMsieve uses to notify you of suspected SPAM. It uses its own mailbox to dump those types of message and then you can peruse the list, again, without opening them, and note which ones might be 'false positives.' You can then select those and use the "Train as Good" menu item. Any messages that are still suspect can then be selected as a group (assuming more than one is listed) and either dumped into the trash or, much better, used with the SPAMsieve "Train as SPAM" menu item.
I still have a "Junk" mailbox, but it is pretty much limited to stuff I might want to see before getting moved to the trash or deleted in 30 days.
I'm sure I've over-generalized and missed some details, but eye've knot maid two mini mistakes, sew for this yeer!
Nor is SPAMsieve the only third-party solution, I'd have to do a search for alternatives and I'll leave that as "an exercise for the reader."
A computer is no more than a tool, you can make it do wondrous things if you learn to use it properly. Otherwise, it simply does whatever the company that built it tells it to do and how. That works fairly well with automobiles and ovens, of course. Not so much with a modern computer that is many times more powerful than those used to launch men to the Moon and return them safely.
