Previous Recipients flagged as Junk

I have a friend who finds that mail gets flagged as Junk even though she presses the Not Junk button each time. Their addresses are in the Previous Recipients because they appear in the popup menu when she types their name in the To: field of a new message. Her preferences are set to exempt Previous Recipients from junk mail filtering. I also had her disable all her custom rules.
Does anyone know why this is happening and how to fix it?
Thanks!
MacBook Mac OS X (10.4.9)

A common cause for this kind of problems is having tinkered with the Junk Mail > Advanced settings without fully understanding how the junk filter works. Try this:
1. Go to Preferences > Junk Mail, disable junk mail filtering, then enable it again. This resets the rule that governs what the junk filter does.
2. Choose either Training or Automatic mode (it doesn’t matter) and leave the other options checked. Click Advanced to see how the junk filter rule is defined now if you want, but don’t touch anything there.
3. Reset the junk filter database (Preferences > Junk Mail > Reset).

Similar Messages

Junk mail filter in yosemite doesn't work. i can't find the 'mark as junk' selection or 'remove from previous recipients' which would help to filter out spam.

junk mail filter in yosemite doesn't work. from the flags, i can't find the 'mark as junk' selection. Formerly clicking on the email address in question would allow one to 'remove from previous recipients' which would help to filter out spam. I've adjusted all the settings under mail preferences, but that is not helping.

Hello Diane162,
Welcome to the Apple Support Communities!
I understand that you would like to be able to filter some of the junk mail that you are receiving in Mail. The attached article has a lot of great information on junk mail filtering, including how to mark as junk and adjust the junk filter.
Mail (Yosemite): Reduce junk mail in your inbox
Cheers,
Joe

"Previous recipients" and junk mail

I have a junk mail filter that looks for
sender not in address book OR
sender not in previous recipients, then
sends these messages to a Suspect folder.
It works well. However, recently some of the junk mail "From" addresses have begun appearing in my Previous Recipients list, even though I have not responded to any of them and in most cases have not even opened the messages. This seems to happen in bursts, for example, yesterday I got seven of them including one from Allume Systems, even though the originators messages were not read or opened.
I am not familiar with spam technology that allows senders to insert themselves as a Previous Recipient without any action by me. Is this a new problem?

What you’re trying to do doesn’t sound right to me.
Anyway, to answer your question, manually marking a
message as not junk also causes the sender to be
added to the Previous Recipients list.
That may be the problem. When I had a bunch of messages get filtered into the suspect folder, 6 were marked as junk, 1 as not junk. I selected them all, clicked Not Junk and then toggled it back to Junk.
I'll try dealing with them individually, and watch for the symptom to go away. Except for this, the filtering per my rules has been close to 100% reliable.
iMac Mac OS X (10.2.x)

Where is "Previous Recipients" located

Hi All,
I have a very sick Mail.app. It no longer has default black font for non junk mail. It no longer filters junk mail by the advanced rules (just plain ignores them,) And training mode caches nothing after some 200 have been marked as junk over the last month. The junk filter has been corrupted in some manor. It has actual been quirky since I went from 10.3.9 to 10.4.3 (by disk). So I intend on junking all of mail and reloading from my tiger disks using D.B. Cooper.app. But I want to save my "Previous Recipients" from the the "Windows" drop-down but I cannot find where "Previous recipients" is located. Can some one give me a Path?
Jim
thanks for all your help.
P.S. I too do not like the changes that have been made to this forum
G5D2/2.5Gs/410in+500out/23HD Mac OS X (10.4.4)

I too have been looking for this for a long time, but checked on Library, Application Support, even examined package contents of Mail and could not find it. It is dumb for Spotlight not to be able to help find a file that contains OUR non-application-code data. I read somewhere else that it is kept with ADDRESSBOOK (so copying AddressBook folder to somewhere else should copy that data also), which is strange to keep it there since it is MAIL data. Anyway, I looked but cannot find a file or resource with that. Still looking.
Imran

Previous Recipients List is Empty, But They Still Show Up

OK, weird issue...
Over the years my previous recipients list has gotten pretty junked up. I read on the forum if I wanted to start from scratch to delete the file in the ~/Library/Application Support/Address Book/ that contained the info. I did that, restarted and when I look at Mail in the Previous Recipients list (Window/Previous Recipients) it is empty. However, when I start to type an address in Mail it is still pulling some info from somewhere that is not in my address book. Any ideas out there?

No one is smart enough to help me out on this one? I am sure someone has seen this!

Address Book Contacts and Mail Previous Recipients Missing/Empty/Deleted

At one point yesterday, I was happily catching up on some email using Mail. All was well. I toggled a message as Junk and went to forward it to [email protected], which was, of course, in my Previous Recipients list. Only this time it wasn't. I noticed, too, in iChat, that all of my buddies had reverted to their IM screen names from their normal Address Book-based First Name/Last Name. So I opened Address Book (which had not been running), and it was empty!
To the best of my recollection, though I have a .Mac account, there was no syncing that occurred during any of this. Worse, when I did a manual Sync to see if .Mac would restore my contacts, it didn't. My Address Book remained empty. Fortunately, it didn't propagate its emptiness to .Mac, which I checked via the Web.
When I fired up my spare iBook, everything seemed fine, and a sync there didn't blow away anything.
I found a few posts that recommended replacing my now empty AddressBook.data file with AddressBook.data.beforesave, which was large enough to seem like it might still have a lot of my contacts. I did this, and my Address Book and Previous Recipients were partially restored. The only problem is that the beforesave file was dated June 2004 and is missing all contact information over the past year and a half.
What the heck happened?! Is there any better solution out there? Any thoughts on why .Mac wasn't able to restore the file? Also, what does Previous Recipients have to do with the Address Book data files?

Is your iBook the way you want it? all of your addresses? if so maybe you could back up that database and replace the old one thats fallen to pieces. If you try that though theres no real chance I think of rebuilding that old one as far as I know. My entouage database was an all in one type of deal. when it fell apart, you lost everything. I went to the mac mail and address book after that. everything is in seperate folders with that stuff. usually I've only seen this on older running installs of OS X. Like there is a bunch of directory probs. then things gradually get goofier over time.
Thats strange it doesn't want to import contacts to your computer.
I'll ask around

Spam Senders appear as Previous Recipients

Yesterday I noticed spammers listed in Previous Recipients. I deleted all Recipients not in my Address Book. Today two new spammers are listed, all from email that arrived today (out of some 60 spams so far).
There are no messages to these senders in my Sent folder, so I don't think Mail sent anything out.
Why would Mail list Senders as Recipients?
Any suggestions on how to prevent this?

None of rules I use bounces email back to sender, forwards or sends out any other email, or starts any Applescripts. The rules just transfer selected emails to specific folders, some to Junk or Trash, and do a few other things like assign a color to certain senders.
The two emails that came today seem like typical spam. I'm looking at the full headers, but don't know enough to notice if anything is out of the ordinary.
I don't know if this is related, but recently the Mail Junk Filter does not work as well as it used to -- it misses lots of spam it used to identify as junk. That might be because the senders were already in my Previous Recipients list. Yesterday I made sure that only "Sender of message is in my Address Book" was checked in Junk Mail preferences to exclude from filtering, but even if Recipients were exempt that wouldn't explain their appearance on Previous Recipients.
What additional information would you need to know?
Thanks for looking at this!

Corrupted Previous Recipients in Mail

Hello,
I recently received a "hostile" email from someone and shortly after reading the email I noticed that many of the names in my previous recipients list had been chenged to "Devil". So now when I start typing in a name for a new email, the word "Devil" is substituted for the person I am sending the mail to. I found that I can remove those items from my Previous Recipients list, but I would like to figure out how this guy did it so I can protect myself from having it happen again. (I will start be having this guy filtered out as junk)
Any ideas??
Thanks

There's absolutely no way that just receiving an e-mail could have done such a thing (on a Mac, anyway). There is no code of any kind that could be included in an e-mail and automatically executed in Mail upon receipt. Unless, of course, you've just discovered a previously unknown security flaw in Mail, but that's unlikely.
This hostile e-mail -- what exactly was it? Did it have any attachments, and if so, did you open them? If you did open an attachment on a hostile e-mail, you could consider yourself lucky if all it did was mess up your previous recipient list!

Previous recipients list includes spam addresses

When exploring Mail's Previous Recipients List, I notice a large number of addresses that are junk or spam mail. Some show a Last Used date that is quite recent.
I had thought that addresses are added to the PR List only when they are used as an addressee on sent email. I don't see anything in my Sent mailbox that would indicate that I (even inadvertently) sent mail to these Spam addresses.
Does the presence of the spam addresses indicate a problem? If working as designed, what is the purpose of keeping the spam address in the PR list?

I too have experienced a recent spam deluge and today I looked in my previous recipients window and found a bunch of spam addresses. I deleted them and let's hope that helps. I did find an older discussion on this forum where someone said that if you mark an item in your junk folder as "not junk" it gets added to your previous recipients folder. I have been trying diligently to mark all of my spam as spam (clicking the thumbs down button in the toolbar), so maybe I have accidentally approved some of it in that process. Will stop doing that. But I was doing that in response to the spam deluge, so I don't think that's what started it. Might be making it worse. Will start checking my previous recipients window and make sure to delete any spam in there.

Moving "previous recipients" from Snow Leopard to Yosemite

Hi all,
My Macbook Pro died. RAM came loose and so it couldn't boot.
It was time for a new laptop anyway so I bought a new one.
My old machine ran Snow Leopard (10.6.8) and was backed up with Time Machine.
My new machine has Yosemite (10.10.2)
I chose not to use Time Machine to restore everything from my old machine to my new machine. I had a lot of junk on the old machine that I didn't want anymore, so I've been reinstalling things individually and grabbing individual files from the Time Machine backup folders.
I'm trying to figure out how to get all my Previous Recipients imported into Mac Mail.
I found a few posts on the internet but their pretty old and they reference Address Book and Yosemite uses Contacts so I'm not sure how to proceed.
Any help would be appreciated.
Also, both my email accounts are gmail-based so if there's some way to get the addresses from gmail online, I could do that too.
Thanks in advance.
P

I think I may have figured it out.
It looks like in Yosemite, the recents now lives here:
~/Library/Containers/com.apple.corerecents.recentsd/Data/Library/Recents/Recents
The Recents file is an sqlite3 file which you can browse (and export to CSV) with sqlitebrowser.
Previously, and I'm not sure when they made the switch (maybe Lion?; around Oct 2013 is the last my file was edited) it used to live here:
~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/SyncedPreferences/com.apple.mai l-com.apple.mail.recents.plist
I'm not sure of an easy way to import from the plist file, but you could always skim the file in a text editor and grab what you need. Not elegant, but it would work. If I figure something else out, I'll let you know.

Spam invading "Previous Recipients"

I have a rule in my mail preferences that will forward an incoming message to my blackberry if the sender is either in my address book or my previous recipients list. I get spam bounced to my blackberry and I can't understand what is forward it to my phone. Since the sender is certainly not in my address book it must think it is in the previous recipients list.
Does anyone else see anything like this?
thanks,
bill plunkett

I too have experienced a recent spam deluge and today I looked in my previous recipients window and found a bunch of spam addresses. I deleted them and let's hope that helps. I did find an older discussion on this forum where someone said that if you mark an item in your junk folder as "not junk" it gets added to your previous recipients folder. I have been trying diligently to mark all of my spam as spam (clicking the thumbs down button in the toolbar), so maybe I have accidentally approved some of it in that process. Will stop doing that. But I was doing that in response to the spam deluge, so I don't think that's what started it. Might be making it worse. Will start checking my previous recipients window and make sure to delete any spam in there.

How can I delete an auto complete address in Mail that is not in Previouse Recipients?

Hello. I have an e-mail address that comes up in auto complete in my e-mail when sending. It is NOT in previous recipients and
I am unable to delete it. Hope someone can help me with it. Thanks

Have found the answer on Apple discussion and was able to delete it in my Address Book.

How to delete the Previous Recipients list in iPhone 3G Mail

I would like to delete the list of previous recipients in my iPhone 3G Mail so that when I search it only shows addresses in my Contacts, not every single random address I may have used.
I know how to do this in Mail on my desktop, and I tried the option of replacing the Mail info on the iPhone with the info from the desktop, but it didn't work.
Anyone knows how to do this?

sanjinzvonic,
In my expeirence, the only way to do this is to restore your iPhone, setting it up as a new phone. You can try resetting all settings prior to this to see if that does it as well.
To reset all settings, navigate to Settings > General > Reset.
Backing Up, updating, and restoring your iPhone and iPod touch software
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1414
Hope this helps,
Raleigh

In mail, how do I print the list of Previous Recipients?

I'm using mail in 10.5.4. It works fine for me, including the capability of suggesting email addresses from the Previous Recipients list. But, of course, this runs only on my eMac at home.
I plan to be away for 3 weeks, and will be using email on various folks' computers, by contacting my email server directly (verizon.net). But my email server does not have my Previous Recipients list.
How can I print the Previous Recipients list?
In the Previous Recipients window, I find that I can select a single email address with a mouse click, and select all the recipients (command-a), but the copy command (command-c) does not work.
I've also tried to look at the file:
~/Library/Application Support/AddressBookApplication Support/AddressBook/MailRecents-v4.abcdmr,
but it is not in a readily viewable text format. The Unix "file" command describes it as an "SQLite database (Version 3)."
Does anyone know how to print a copy of the Previous Recipients, to take with me on vacation?
Thanks

This turns out to be more complicated than I had hoped, but it is possible.
The Apple mail program uses a database program available in Unix called “sqlite3.”
The executable is in /usr/bin.
For information about this program, type “man sqlite3” in a terminal window. Also, there is information on the web, at www.sqlite.org.
A friend whose day job is in database administration helped me work this out.
First, go the proper directory in a terminal window:
cd ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook
The file of interest is MailRecents-v4abcdmr.
Note that the “file” command describes this as:
file MailRecents-v4abcdmr
MailRecents-v4.abcdmr: SQLite database (Version 3)
sqlite3 MailRecents-v4.abcdmr
SQLite version 3.4.0
Enter ".help" for instructions
sqlite>
Let’s see the headers:
sqlite> .headers ON
Now, let’s get some information about what’s in this database file:
sqlite> select * from SQLITE_MASTER; /* don’t forget the semicolon */
/* lots of output */
The table ZABCDMAILRECENT is of interest to us. Note that the last 3 columns are called ZLASTNAME, ZFIRSTNAME, and ZEMAIL. We want these from the table, in columns, in filename.txt.
sqlite> .mode columns ZABCDMAILRECENT
sqlite> .width 15 15 36 /* make sure the columns are wide enough */
sqlite> .output filename.txt /* note: no ‘;’ */
sqlite:> select ZLASTNAME, ZFIRSTNAME, ZEMAIL from ZABCDMAILRECENT;
sqlite> .exit
Done. The email names and addresses are now in filename.txt, one per line.
Maybe, someday, someone at Apple will add this capability to mail.

Anyone know how to copy/export previous recipients list from Outlook to iCloud?

Hi,
Ever since using MobileMe and now iCloud to sync contacts with Outlook, I've had horrendous issues with mulitple duplicates within my contacts. In an attempt to resolve this, I've manually removed all the duplicates, synced with my iphone and ipad and iCloud and removed them from my local Outlook contacts folder. Then, within Outlook, all the contacts are only listed in the iCloud folder. This seems to be working well now for a few months, but now, every time I write a new email, there's no auto-suggest of my contacts emails, like there was before. Is there a file that stores a previous recipients list that can be copied or moved to accomodate emails being sent from my iCloud account?
Thanks for any help.

sanjinzvonic,
In my expeirence, the only way to do this is to restore your iPhone, setting it up as a new phone. You can try resetting all settings prior to this to see if that does it as well.
To reset all settings, navigate to Settings > General > Reset.
Backing Up, updating, and restoring your iPhone and iPod touch software
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1414
Hope this helps,
Raleigh

Previous Recipients flagged as Junk

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for