This page was imported from my old site and is yet to be reviewed.

So assuming you have a spam filter and you end up with some mail in a "filtered" box which you want to hand-check before deleting. I've found that there are a few things you can do which really speed this process up.

If your mailer lets you customize it's settings on a per-folder basis, then take advantage of this. Reading through a mailbox of filtered mail is a totally different activity to reading normal mail.

bind a convenience key
I keep hand-classified spam in a folder for stats purposes. Bind a key (in my case, 'S') to the save operation you need. You might also want to turn off wait_key to make the process quicker.
sort by subject
I enjoy having my normal mail threaded together and sorted by ascending date, where a thread's date is defined as being the date of the last post to it. However, this isn't an efficient way to handle spam. I suggest ordering by subject. You will find that you get a run of a hundred or so spams with exactly the same subject, which you can glance at and disregard.
scrolling
mutt's default setting seems to be to scroll through mail one by one. Turn this off when handling spam. You want to see a screen's worth of mail, classify it, hit the requisite number of 'S' keys, and be presented with the next batch, not one at a time.