Lois, I feel your pain.
i earn my living on my macs. and am saying that the junk mail issue isn't terrible.
And so it it written.
LOL Ignorace is arrogance. I stumbled on this old thread because of having problems with Mail and Apple's constant changing of details being a pain.
I earn my living on Macs and am saying the junk mail issue IS terrible. At least for two of us. My incoming emails only average around 275-300 daily. DAILY, ICYMT. I have rules upon rules to triage and it's still a pain.
Eliminating junk mail is far more tedious than in needs to be, and has been. With each new version, somebody at Apple makes a new tweak for the sake of making one, maybe because they didn't get to do so last time.
The Thumbs Down, very intuitive, has been replaced by some kind of bucket. Does the same thing, took a while to find it and figure it out. That shouldn't be necessary.
I can Cmd-Click on email I consider Junk (and that I've told the OS is junk but it's failed) and send a raft of them to the Junk folder by clicking the bucket. Good. (Except for the 'known' Junk Apple let slip through.)
Mail in my Inbox marked Junk, can't be marked Not Junk without opening it first. Bad.
The OS often marks Junk mail correctly, but fails to move it to the Junk folder. Bad
If I go to the Junk folder and see something that Apple has erroneously marked as Junk, I can't click on it and send it back as not Junk. This should be (as I've told Apple) at the very least a contextual menu option. Instead I have to open it and click Move to Inbox. Bad.
Instead of calling it the less intuitive Move to In Box, Apple should have called it Not Junk. Clicking either would sent it back to Inbox without a user have to
assume that Move to Inbox will also mark it as not Junk. Bad.
After screening the Junk mail folder for errors, after opening the known not-Junk Mail, after marking it Not Junk, the Mail should automatically go to the Inbox and not have to be manually sorted. Bad.
You say it's not terrible? Bull. Speak for yourself. I can fully understand Apple's capricious handling of Mail features alone being enough to drive a business person to another platform, let alone some of the many quirky and incomprehensible decisions they've made over the last several iterations of OSs.
You're happy. I don't care. But don't condescend to tell someone else that your experience is theirs, or trumps theirs. It didn't help Lois, doesn't help me, and makes you look like a schmuck.
I'll look for answers elsewhere and try some new email clients as well.