How to efficiently mark mail as spam before reviewing it in Mac OS X Mail.app?

Question

If my ISP marks an email as spam, and moves it to the spam folder before the Mac OS X Mail.app sees it, Mail.app does not mark these emails as spam.

This wouldn’t be too bad if there was a way for me to efficiently mark these as spam (so that I can review them just in case without triggering one-pix image trackers and the like), but there does not seem to be one:

• Keyboard shortcuts are a non-starter, as they require the message to be selected first.
• Right-clicking the emails one by one to mark them as spam (which requires going in a submenu each time) is tiresome.
• In Lion, I could select multiple of them (being careful never to select only one spam) and mass-mark as spam without viewing any of them, but that stopped working when Mail.app got the ability to show multiple message selections as a pile of messages.
• I can re-position the dividers or resize the window to hide the message view pane and mass-mark at that time, but that requires re-positioning them back manually each time, and that won’t do.

Is there something I have missed?

Answer 1

One solution would be select all those messages and mark them as Junk using an iOS device, which would not load/preview emails until they’re opened.

You can also run the following AppleScript:
tell application "Mail" to set junk mail status of (messages of mailbox "QUARANTINE" of account "NAME" whose junk mail status is false) to true

Replace NAME with the name of your account, as defined under Mail → Preferences → Accounts.

You can then run that script anytime you want to mark all those messages as junk.

You could even setup a rule under Mail → Preferences → Rules:

1. If any of the following conditions are met: Every Message
2. Perform the following actions: Run AppleScript
3. In the dropdown click Open in Finder.
4. Drop your .scpt file into the window that opens up.
5. Select that script in the action’s dropdown menu.
6. Set this rule as your topmost rule, so that it runs before any rule that ends with Stop evaluating rules.