Faithful reader Kevin Taylor knows of my love of Gmail and its spam filtering but finds such an account problematic on his Mac. He writes:
I’ve turned on the nice IMAP support Gmail has and it’s working great with Apple Mail (3.2). The problem is that now I get Gmail spam in Apple Mail. It’s shunted off to the Gmail IMAP Spam folder, of course, but it shows up in my Trash when I delete it in Mail, and thus is prone to showing up in Spotlight and search. Any clever fixes for this one?
If your primary beef is that Spotlight finds this stuff, you can hide it from Spotlight’s searching gaze by doing this:
Navigate to your user folder/Library/Mail. Locate your IMAP mailbox, click the triangle next to it, and locate the Spam and Trash mbox files.
Open System Preferences and then the Spotlight system preference. Click the Privacy tab and drag the Spam and Trash mbox files to the Spotlight preference window. Spotlight will no longer show results from items in these mailboxes.