Training As Good By Adding domain name only for whitelist

I’m sorry if this is a perennial question. I’ve been using SpamSieve for over 6 months now. The Train As Good option adds the specific email address to the White List. However, for many sites and services, I may receive invoice@domain.com, support@domain.com or melissa@domain.com. The point is that I just need to white list the domain. This applies to SO MANY SITES that I cannot tell you how important it is.

Is there some reason why this rather obvious functionality isn’t available? I use SpamSieve (current version) with AirMail and I have two pop-up menu choices: Train As Good and Train As Spam. Why isn’t there a Train Domain As Good? I know SpamSieve is doing a lot of other stuff as well, but setting up a lean white list based on domains will prevent having to train every single address from the same good, non-spam domain.

Again, I’m sure this question gets asked a lot and I apologize.

I think it’s only been asked a handful of times in the last 15 years because it’s rarely necessary to whitelist whole domains. You can do so if you want by creating rules yourself in the Whitelist window. But it’s not a common enough action to clutter and confuse the user interface and risk spams getting through because of inappropriate whitelist rules.

You should not be training every single address. SpamSieve automatically learns all the addresses that it sees and also learns, statistically, about whole domains. You only need to train the mistakes. Good messages misclassified as spam should be very rare. If you’re getting a lot of these, there’s probably something wrong with the setup or training on your Mac, and it’s better to fix the source of the problem, so that it all works automatically, than to make lots of domain-specific rules.

I guess we’ll have to differ on the use of the term “inappropriate”. To me, having the domains for important bills, my company, my trusted vendors, JUST the domains, seems like it should be the FIRST STEP in a chain of span filtering events.

I agree that I should not be training every single address, although somewhere it says that for SpamSieve to work optimally, you should be training regularly. And yes, the statistical analysis is not working correctly. Just this morning, I got two misclassified emails. I regularly get emails from The Washington Post and I have trained SpamSieve over many months by selecting these emails and choosing “Train As Good”. There are several entries in the whitelist for various Washington Post emails and yet, again this morning, I find another Washington Post email marked as spam. In the raw email source, I see X-Spam-Status: Yes, score=4.1, so perhaps the Spam Filtering on my email server is marking it as spam. The email server ALSO has a whitelist.

The question becomes whether I should turn off the server spam filtering, in which case, what to do about the emails coming to my phone?

I would pay up to $200 for a class (in person or online) for working with spam software to optimize my spam filtering. I truly would. By the way, I’m using AirMail not Apple Mail as my client and unlike the rest of the world, I’m still using the email server for my web host.

Your examples make sense, but there is the potential for someone to whitelist other domains that are inappropriate without really understanding what they’re doing. In any case, experience shows that it’s usually not necessary to whitelist these types of important domains because SpamSieve automatically learns that information during the initial training.

If you can tell me where you are referring to, I would like to clarify that sentence. You are definitely not supposed to be training it regularly, only correcting the mistakes.

It sounds like it’s your server spam filter, not SpamSieve, that made this mistake. But if you send in a diagnostic report, I can check for sure.

I recommend turning off server filters unless there is a specific reason that you need them on. Filtering mail to your phone is a good reason, if you’re not able to keep your Mac running to do the filtering.

If you want to use Apple Mail (or run it in the background for this purpose), you could use this script to have SpamSieve try to clean up after your server filter, e.g. moving the good messages back to your inbox.