Your Spam Filter Needs work

[cwayneu]

First off, I find the spam filter a very important feature. However, there is no way to "train" it. When I find an email in my spam folder that was a mistake, I should be able to select it and click the "not spam" button, and the filter remembers this "from" address. However, that does nothing. The same email from that "from" address just ends up as spam the next time it occurs. Conversely, if I select an email in my "inbox" that was spam and hit the "spam" button, it should remember that as spam for the next time. None of this works as any reasonable thought process should conclude.

I have even set up my own special filters to move mistakes back to my "inbox", as well as rules where spam that your filter missed is rejected or moved to the spam folder. Sometimes this works and sometimes it does not (???). And I am not sure that if I make a compound condition, like "from contains xxx" plus "subject contains xyz", whether that is an OR or an AND condition. There is also no obvious way to arrange the order (prioritize) that the personal rules execute.

[Latoque]

Incoming emails hit the spam filters before they get to any rules you set up.   You share the filtering system with all other Comcast email users.  Using the "Spam" "Not Spam" buttons does help train the filters, but it can take time and a lot of markings to have an effect on your account.  You should find this of interest----------------------

https://askleo.com/what_happens_when_i_mark_something_as_spam/?awt_l=E37kF&awt_m=Ja6LBKrzt3dfbL

If you are using the Comcast webmail, scroll down in the article to "Marking spam on an email service"

[BruceW]

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@cwayneu wrote: ... if I make a compound condition, like "from contains xxx" plus "subject contains xyz", whether that is an OR or an AND condition.

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When a filter has more than one condition, the line "Apply rule if all conditions are met", located just below the filter name, becomes a dropdown. You can leave it set to "all" to indicate the conditions should be ANDed, or select "Apply rule if any conditions is met" to indicate they should be ORed.

[cwayneu]

OK, I understand that your rules must be generic. However in a perfect user-friendly world that action of flagging an email as not spam would set that up in my private account settings by creating the appropriate personal rule for me.

And I have one situation where I get an email every day from an e-book club.  I have set up rules for the from address, another for the subject line, yet every day that email gets thrown into my spam folder. Other rules seem to work OK.

I will check out the article you referenced. Thanks.

[BruceW · Accepted solution]

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@cwayneu wrote: ... I get an email every day from an e-book club.  I have set up rules for the from address, another for the subject line, yet every day that email gets thrown into my spam folder....

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In Comcast's email, user-defined filters operate only on mail delivered to the Inbox. As stated, if Comcast's systems decide a message is spam, they deliver it directly to the Spam folder and it is not processed by any user-defined filters. What you are attempting to do just won't work.

They have been asked for at least a decade to provide a way to "whitelist" mail from selected senders so that it is not considered spam, but they never have.

[cwayneu]

As an old systems architect, it seems like an easy fix to apply the user defined email rules to the spam folder AND then the inbox folder. Not as ideal as having the rules created for me when I unspam something, but at least a work around.

And if what you are saying about the process is correct, then there is absolutely no good reason to select an email and clicking on SPAM to move it to the spam folder. Why not just delete it outright if it is not "training" the filter?

By the way, are compound rule conditions treated as AND or OR?

[cwayneu]

By the way, the article was interesting but not very helpful for me. I am a retired systems architect after 34 years and also taught a variety of computer science classes for Purdue during that time. So the article was way too generic. As for your Comcast support personnel not fixing this general annoyance, I simply call those lazy programmers and would have been on my folk's butts. LOL

[BruceW]

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@cwayneu wrote: ... are compound rule conditions treated as AND or OR?

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Please see my message above, from 06-12-2020 at 04:39 PM.

You can also use a "Nested" condition, which applies the same ANY/ALL choices previously described to a group of conditions.

[cwayneu]

Thanks.