Reader Jorrit Dijkstra would like his laptop to be as smart as his desktop Mac when it comes to junk mail. He writes:
I have a desktop iMac G5 and a PowerBook G4, both running OS 10.4.7. I am using the Mail application’s junk mail filter on both machines, and I have “trained” the filter on my iMac desktop to my liking. I would like both machines to use exactly the same training parameters. To avoid having to train the filter on my PowerBook the same way (which is probably not even exactly possible), is there a way to synchronize these parameters, or at least copy the trained filter’s settings from my iMac to my PowerBook?
There is. On your desktop Mac follow this path:
~/Library/Mail and locate the LSMMap2 file. It’s within this file that Mail stores its junk mail training data.
Quit Mail on your PowerBook, navigate to this same path on your portable, and move its LSMMap2 file to the desktop just in case you need it later (and you’d only need it if the replacement copy didn’t work to your satisfaction). Now copy the LSMMap2 file from the desktop Mac to the same location on your PowerBook (you can do this via a network between the two machines or by copying the file to a USB keydrive and sneakernetting it to the other Mac). Launch Mail and your PowerBook should have the same junk mail filtering savvy as your iMac.