Tips for digging out from email (+/or spam services to sign up for?)

Question

i am getting crushed with email.
i am having issues on my machines (laptop, desktop and iphone) with mac mail either sending or receiving mail and no amount of troubleshooting has fixed this (i get that yield symbol all the time).
i have two website domain based email, an icloud account and a gmail account and i have about fifteen email addresses and eight signatures for these various accounts.
on top of this my new website host apparently has a problem with mail clients "pinging" their servers (a problem that results in the shutdown of my website) so i have had to create an "[email protected]" email address and i have FORWARDED email to this all account so i only have to access one account and not ping the server multiple times.
to avoid this i set up Sparrow as a low overhead very fast email client but in some cases i am seeing mail on in some clients that is not in others and i cannot tell if this is due to my not adding an account to a particular client or if this is due to something getting mixed up with the forwarder (perhaps mail is arriving in the account and instead of staying there and getting forwarded it is simply getting deleted and getting forwarded so i don't see it in the mac mail client?!) or what.
anyway, after that long pre-amble i am wondering if anyone is in a similar boat and found a good solution but i am also wondering if anyone has set up a SPAM FILTER RETURNER such as one of the online services i have seen. i had someone i know automatically kick back an email and the service asked me to add my name to their whitelist so that their Client would not be bombarded with mail and this seemed like a super slick and easy way to cut down on a lot of issues with the VOLUME i am getting.
TIA

Answer 1

hotwheels 22 wrote:
hi Csound1. a big thanks again.
i am reviewing the MailSteward documents and online vids. it looks great so far. thanks for the confirmation on it. also thanks for the reference to SpamSieve. i had heard of it before but i didn't quite get there for some reason. can i please just ask you something conceptually here?
i am using MailSteward to /archive/ emails for storing but i am leaving (say for instance all of 2013 email) actually in Mac Mail on IMAP, is this correct? i mean, MailSteward is not going to take the place of Mac Mail and/or is it going to take all my "On My Mac" Mail out of Mac Mail? i mean, i see that it is also going to give me the opportunity to recover very old mail which would be really great because i have almost completely trashed this after giving up on using it again (dumb i know).
MailSteward moves nothing, it makes an index of your mail and displays it in a simple (SQLite) database, it also copies the mail into its own storage while indexing. The Mail program is not affected by this at all. It is also a handy way to backup email, just copy the MS database.
anyway. also SpamSieve is going to require me to set it up over time on /both/ my computers even if i am using IMAP or is it possible that it can "learn" from both computers or even learn from one (the desktop) and then i port these settings to my laptop or is this a stupid question and it will act on all my IMAP mail globally somehow?
finally, once i get the On My Mac mail out of the way and i have somewhat organized the 2013 email that is in IMAP, at that point am i creating Smart Folders or Filters to organize future /imcoming/ email or would you just suggest managing this manually as best i can with SpamSieve installed?
THANKS
SpamSieve does need learning time, no way around that and the 2 machines will both have to learn. It's a bit of a PITA but worth it in the end.
Be patient, time for a cocktail
Smart Folders also move nothing, the email stays where it was, it is visible in a smart folder (which is not a folder) because it meets the criteria specified. If you delete what appears to be the copy in the smart folder, you just deleted the original email.