Thank you, Washington Post, for an hour or two wasted… I made ONE mistake in the fight against spam on my MacMail and ended up having to sift through thousands of messages, marking the ones that are not spam by rebuilding a rule for every message. Each “rule” requires not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, but SIX clicks! Make another mistake, and you have another giant fuck-up to a) recognize; b) figure out; c) track down; and d) fix.
On a Mac, you can derail spam to the “Trash” folder by creating a “rule” that identifies the offending sender and states that everything coming from that address should go to the “Trash.” However, the rule function defaults to select not the sender but the recipient. That is: by default it targets all incoming mail directed to you!
If you’re half asleep, as you usually are by the time you’ve clicked through a dozen or more nuisances early in the morning, you can carelessly click “yeah, yeah, just DO IT,” thereby telling MacMail to send all incoming mail to the garbage.
Far as I can tell, there’s no way to undo this mistake.
You now have all your mail directed to the trash.
Your choices, then, are
a) to write a new rule directing MacMail to send all incoming mail, including the tons and tons and tons of spam, to your in-box, requiring you to re-filter every single goddamn spam message, or
b) to filter the contents of your inbox (mine had not been cleaned out since last January…) by sender’s name and then go through and search out everyone you want to hear from and write a new rule to direct each person’s messages to your in-box.
Either way, it’s a huge, huge, HUGE hassle.
This was occasioned by a series of spams from The Washington Post, which inflicts a campaign that you cannot opt out of. There is no “quit spamming me, assholes” link in their messages, and of course a request that they please quit it results in still more trash mails.
When I clicked to tell MacMail to spamify the latest nuisance message from WaPo, I accidentally hit “send all incoming mail” to the spam folder. So…yes…
So much trash arrives every day that the time-suck involved in searching for and re-classifying all legitimate senders is actually less than the time-suck involved in searching for and zapping all spammers.
Well, my mailboxes are now all cleaned out. It remains to be seen how many legitimate business and personal correspondents’ messages will be derailed to the spam folder, thanks to the idiots at The Washington Post. I don’t know how the Post got my email address. But I can tell ya one thing for sure: I’ll never read another WaPo article online! Or anywhere else.