Avoiding Spam attribution for video alarm notification in Mail.app

Question

I had been searching for years to avoid my own camera video alarm to be placed into spam by my Mail spam filter.

I finally understand the problem and have found a solution so I share it here.

The camera, an Axis model, can be configured to send mail by connecting to a smtp server.

The smtp server will send mail to an alias address that will be redirected to a final address.

Then the final address will be retrieved from the Mail app.

And in Mail app, the mail will likely not be stored online as the addition of images by these video will unnecessarily bite into iCloud storage plan (your mileage may vary)

The source of the problem is that Mail/iCloud won't allow you to force a message as "not spam" if it has decided otherwise.

Answer 1

The solution : basically, using Mail app but not iCloud services.

1. use a regular ISP mail account (and not me.com) to send the message from the camera, incuding SMTP authentication, but change the apparent "from mail:" to a bogus one; e.g [email protected]
2. use a regular ISP mail account for receiving the mail (and not me.com); e.g [email protected]
3. configure your ISP account [email protected] to consider [email protected] as "Not spam"
4. set up Mail to retrieve [email protected] and set a rule to transfer it on your Mac based on sender : [email protected]
5. You can create a bogus contact in the contact app (Axis : [email protected]) that will make it easy to read in mail App

Advantage of this solution :

1. it works
2. you don't really need to create specific email account as you surely have already an account for spam mail ([email protected])
3. you won't activate iCloud spam algorithm which identifies that [email protected] is bogus and forces it to spam folder

This little trick might help you analyse other use cases where you get forced spam mails.