Abysmal Mail performance while Spamsieve enabled

SpamSieve
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1

For some months Apple Mail on my MacBook Pro has run extremely slowly, and has not run at all on my iOS products (incoming emails would show up but would not open message bodies). Recently Mail has failed in that it consistently failed to finish loading new traffic.

I’ve just finished re-initializing Mail (as part of Mac OS X Sonoma 14.5). I have further removed and reinstalled all mail accounts. In the case of my principal account, del@pscc.com, I have installed a new account, david@pscc.com, and copied all the messages from del@pscc.com to david@pscc.com.

At this point, Mail appears to operate properly both on my MacBook Pro and on both iPad and iPhone installations. However, enabling Spamsieve 3.0.5, which I reinstalled according to your Apple Mail instructions, has not been successful — it reduced all Mail operations to a snail’s pace, accompanied most of the time by a multi-colored whirling dervish. At this point, killing Spamsieve returns normal operations to Mail, but without the benefit of spam elimination.

I’ve run Spamsieve successfully for several years, so my file sizes are substantial:

Filtered Mail
843,041 Good Messages
877,522 Spam Messages (51%)
348 Spam Messages Per Day

SpamSieve Accuracy
412 False Positives
2,507 False Negatives (86%)
99.8% Correct

Corpus
26,891 Good Messages
20,814 Spam Messages (44%)
5,250,662 Total Words

Rules
494,038 Allowlist Rules
5,226 Blocklist Rules

Showing Statistics Since
8/14/17, 15:44

Could that be the problem? Should I purge or reduce some of these files?

I’d appreciate any suggestions.

2

That’s certainly not normal, so please see the troubleshooting information here.

It’s almost certainly not related to the size of SpamSieve’s files. It might be related to the size of Mail’s files, if you have a single mailbox that’s very large, or perhaps to Mail’s handling of slow server connections.

1 Like
3

Michael –

I tried your suggestions but found no improvement. I’ve saved a Spamsieve Diagnostic Report and can post or send it if that would be helpful.

Anything else to do?

Thanks,

Dave.

4

As mentioned on that page, the most important thing to do if you need more help is to see the Sending in a “Sample” Report section for how you can record what Mail is doing so that we can investigate the cause of the slowness.

It would also be helpful to send the diagnostic report via e-mail.

5

Thanks for the diagnostic report. I recommend that you go to the Filter spam messages in other mailboxes setting and uncheck all the mailboxes there. The inboxes should not be selected because they are filtered automatically, anyway, and the spam mailboxes should never be selected or filtering.

That may fix the problem. If not, please click this link to enable some additional debug logging. When the problem occurs again, save a new diagnostic report and also record sample logs from Mail and SpamSieve during the spinning beachball.

6

Thanks for sending the new diagnostic report. It does not look like you unchecked the mailboxes as described above. I’m continuing to investigate an issue related to Mail’s database, which will probably explain the slowness.

7

I think some of the errors may be because you have it set to filter the del@pscc.com account, which no longer exists.

Please also click this link to enable some additional debug logging.

8

Just following up here because I don’t think I heard back from you. Is the slowness still occurring?

9

The slowness has largely disappeared since I deleted and re-entered the account at the "Internet Account” level (System Settings>Internet Accounts). Deleting and re-entering from within Mail (using Mail>Settings) wasn’t enough. I went through a couple of technicians at AppleCare before finding one who suggested this and said she’d seen it before.

At this point, most of the delays are gone and all is working much more smoothly, although I still do see a muti-colored whirling dervish occasionally.

Spamsieve seems to be working properly, thanks to your persistent efforts to keep it going.

That is good to hear. If you do continue to see the spinning beachball cursor, please record more sample logs from Mail and SpamSieve so that we can look into that.