I’ve used SpamSieve for many many years. From the beginning and through all the changes I’ve never had any problem and never had any need to fiddle much with the settings, look at the log or at the corpus. For a few months I’ve been running it with both Mail and MailMaven. And it has been working fine. Then tonight, on my laptop, I started getting SpamSieve notifications of lots and lots and lots of messages being marked as good–old messages. All good, with scores between 1 and 4. What did I do to provoke this and will it happen again?
SpamSieve doesn’t go looking for old messages on its own. If you go to the
Log window, you can click on the Predicted: Good log entries for some of these messages, and the Origin line in the lower pane will say where the message came from and why SpamSieve examined it.
I looked at one from 9/10 and it showed:
GNCSU (IMAP) ‣ INBOX in Mail 16.0 (filter inboxes)
GNCSU is my name for my university account.
Ahh, a quick sampling of ten or so shows them all be from that GNCSU (I also have a gmail.com account and an icloud.com account. )
It looks like perhaps you rebuilt Mail’s database or your mail provider reset something so that Mail re-downloaded the messages as if they were new. If the same message gets removed and re-added to Mail’s database with a new identifier, SpamSieve will see it as a different message and try to filter it again.
If you think this might happen again, you could go to SpamSieve’s settings and toggle the Check inboxes for new messages not sent to Mail extension and Filter spam messages in other mailboxes checkboxes off and then on again. This will tell SpamSieve never to filter any messages that were received before now.
Twasn’t me. (Not only because I firmly remember not doing it, but because even if I had I would have done all my accounts.) So, it was NCSU for some mysterious reason.
Filter spam messages in other mailboxes has always been off.
I’ll keep a wary watch.
Thanks for responding.
I have perhaps a dumb question. I’m running both Mail and MailMaven (and MailMaven keeps a separate database) and SpamSieve is active in both and that all seems smooth. (It’s actually handy that MailMaven keeps a separate database since I can use HoudahSpot to search.) BUT, is there a separate log file for MailMaven? Where?
No, SpamSieve has a single log, and it will show in each log entry which mail program was the origin of the action.
If I correctly understand you, I agree, SpamSieve has gotten very complicated. I also have used SS a very long time and I miss the “set it and forget it” days (except for some manual training). It used to be so easy that I installed it on my Mother’s Macbook. Now it does seem complicated to maintain. It is good software however but too complicated to maintain on my mother’s computer (92 yr). I keep getting green flagged spam in my inbox for one thing. Dunno why but I have seen Michael_T say not to train as Spam. Doesn’t make sense cause if it’s spam…
Yep. I was a bit confused because the Origin entries were all Mail (and none from MailMaven). Of course most people don’t run two mail programs at the same time! It happens because Mail on my desktop grabs mail quicker than MailMaven so it gets first shot at being the Origin. All fine. When I shut down Mail on both my laptop and desktop MailMaven started appearing as an Origin in the Log. I want to add that although SpamSieve has gotten more complicated most of that is under the hood and on the rare occasions when I’ve had to lift the hood I’ve found the documentation and Michael both clear and helpful. And this latest episode was more of a curiousity than a problem. And an opportunity to look under the hood a bit. I’m particularly happy that I didn’t have to do anything to get it working with MailMaven which at the moment is a pretty raw beta.
It would be interested to know what you are finding too complicated and what you need to maintain so that I can simplify it or explain it better. From my perspective, the setup process is much shorter/easier now: no plug-in to install or enable—or update and re-enable after each macOS update—no need to create any rules in Apple Mail. Training works essentially the same way as before.
The Log shows a lot more information now, which I suppose looks more complicated, but most people should never need to open that window. The idea here was to give people more tools to see what’s going on so that they can troubleshoot when necessary and we can help more efficiently. As an example, David’s situation could be very confusing with older versions of SpamSieve because the log did not track the Origin, so there was no way to tell which mail client initiated an action or see whether it was because of the client or a script or a manual action from the user.
The green flagging is a new option, which is off by default. You can turn it back off if you want.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to. Green flagged spam in the inbox should definitely be trained as spam.