Gilbert Harding. I Am Not Dead

One of the criticisms of the iPhone mail application is the absence of any mail filtering. If like me you enjoy a relatively spam free existence courtesy of SpamSieve on your main machine, the appearance of spam on the iPhone when out and about is irritating.
There are several workarounds published on the net, many of them require the use of a Google mail account. Google’s spam filtering is exceptionally good, but I’m not a fan of the way it handles IMAP folders. Besides which I have a .Mac, or MobileMe account, and I prefer to use that.

So this is how I manage my email, based on this article published on macmerc.

I set up my old Apple Cube, with Leopard 10.5.6, to be my mail drone. It’s on 24/7 connected to the internet. I cloned all the mail settings from my main MacBookPro to the Cube, installed SpamSieve and copied over the Corpus.
I disabled SpamSieve on the MacBookPro. Set Apple Mail on the Cube to check for new mail every minute, and set the MacBookPro to every 5 minutes.
MobileMe on the Cube is also syncing the Address book and Mail accounts, but nothing else. SpamSieve uses the address book contents as part of it’s spam filtering routine.

Now the Cube manages all my mail rules including the spam filters, and sorts incoming mail into the IMAP folders. Through the magic of IMAP when any other machine checks for mail it’s all sorted, and the spam is already in the spam folder.

Except on the iPhone if you have push enabled, because the mail will arrive on the phone before the Cube’s next scheduled check.
Once the Cube does check, and runs the SpamSieve rules, the spam will be moved to the spam folder on the iPhone as well.

I have also installed a couple of Applescript rules into Mail on the Cube. These scripts were written by Michael Tsai from C-Command, the man behind SpamSieve. You can find these scripts on the macmerc page linked above, which has a much longer and more detailed run through to set this all up.
These scripts enable easy SpamSieve training on any machine including the iPhone.

It’s not a perfect solution, but until, or if, Apple puts rules into mail on the iPhone, it works for me.

Professional writer for hire. Freelance. Copywriting, editorials, travel writing.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 11:54 am and is filed under Apple Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.