Here's an excellent tip, beautifully explained by our good friend Doctor Jay...

> I'm a happy Entourage user, but I tried out the spam filtering
> capabilities of mail in Jaguar, and found them to be everything they were
> promised to be. Fortunately, I've found a way to get mail to filter my spam
> out before it hits Entourage:
>
> Set up Mail to work with the accounts you want filtered. Under the "advanced"
> tab, click the "remove a copy from server after retrieving:", and then set the
> popup below that to "when removed from Inbox". This way, anything that you or
> a rule move out of the Inbox will get deleted on the next connection. Set the
> program to check mail more often than Entourage does (I have Mail set to check
> every 5 minutes, with Entourage only connecting manually).
>
> Now, still under preferences, click the "Rules" pane. Make sure that "junk" is
> the only rule active, or other messages might get filtered to a different
> mailbox, then deleted from the server before you grab it in Entourage. We want
> that to happen with junk, so we'll edit the junk rule to have it move the
> message to a different mailbox (I have mine saved in a folder called junk,
> just so I can make sure nothing gets mis-filed). Hide the mail program, and
> you're ready to go.
>
> Now, whenever mail identifies something as junk, it moves it to a different
> folder and deletes it from the server. The junk's almost always deleted by the
> time I get my mail in Entourage, so I never see it. I'm a happy camper.

I'm glad he explained this because, like him, I'm a happy Entourage user as well. But in my limited experimentation with Mail's spam filtering, I was duly impressed. And I've got Entourage nicely tricked out--with my own set of rules combined with the built-in Entourage rules. It works pretty well but spam always seems to get through. Jay's way should allow even less spam to creep into my life.

I can't wait.

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Bob LeVitus is a leading authority on Mac OS and the author of 40 books, including Mac OS X For Dummies and The Little iTunes Book.