I have run SpamSieve on an Intel 2018 Mac Mini as a drone for a year and half with no problems, clearing the spam remotely on a MacBook Pro and a 2024 Mac Mini M4 Pro using Apple Mail on all the machines. I am using SpamSieve’s extension, not the plug-in.
Yesterday, I retired the Intel Mac Mini and installed the latest SpamSieve (3.2.2) on the Mac Mini M4 Pro (running MacOS Tahoe 26.2). I configured both SpamSieve and Apple Mail per the online manual so that this Mac Mini M4 Pro will now be the drone, but Apple Mail hangs as soon as SpamSieve runs. I have tried everything that I have read on these forums, ensuring the right settings are enabled, disabling the SpamSieve extension, uninstalling and reinstalling SpamSieve, rebooting in Safe Mode, etc., but to no avail.
I finally rebuilt the database on Apple Mail, per the online manual. I started SpamSieve again, but with spam filtering on Apple Mail disabled, and Apple Mail did not hang. I made sure all the settings were correct (I had toggled so many of them through earlier troubleshooting) and then reenabled spam filtering on Mail. However, Apple Mail again hung with the spinning beach ball as soon as it was enabled. What more can I do?
It looks like Mail has a threading bug where it’s deadlocking when trying to create a new mailbox (presumably due to the remote training feature) at the same time that it’s indexing your mail for searching (probably a long backlog if you just migrated to a new Mac). If you wait long enough, probably the indexing will finish and this will all resolve by itself. Or you could manually create TrainSpam and TrainGood mailboxes in each account so that SpamSieve doesn’t need to do this. (It’s unclear to me why these mailboxes don’t already exist if you had been using the drone setup on the old Mac.)
Hi, Michael. Thanks for this. I have been using the 2024 Mac Mini M4 Pro for just under a year and Apple Mail has worked just fine. The Intel Mac had been handling SpamSieve remotely and the TrainSpam and TrainGood mailboxes had been set up on all the accounts and were working fine when used with Apple Mail on the Mac Mini M4 Pro, iPad and MacBook Pro. Do you still suggest waiting? And what am I waiting for?
I suggest that you enable spam filtering but turn off Train messages in TrainSpam and TrainGood for now and see if that works. If so, we could then move on to getting remote training working.
You could also click here to tell the remote training feature not to try to create the special mailboxes, which should avoid the problem, though if it’s trying to create a mailbox that presumably means that at least one of them is missing.
Thanks again, Michael. That seems to have done the trick. Apple Mail is not hanging while SpamSieve is running and I can train it on here with no problem. Long term, however, how do we get to a point where I can restore remote training? I do a lot on my iPad and MacBook Pro and use the TrainSpam and TrainGood folders a lot. What’s the end game for getting back to full functionality?
Oh, and by the way, your tech support is awesome, Michael. I had already noticed that before in the forums and now I’m seeing it up close and personal. I appreciate your patience and diligence in helping move this forward.
If you clicked the link, you can probably re-enable remote training without causing any problems.
However, probably there is something wrong with one of the mailboxes or else SpamSieve would not have been trying to create it. So you may find that SpamSieve does not automatically process one or more of the training mailboxes. It should be obvious which one(s), as you would see the messages collecting there. If you observe that, we could troubleshoot further from there.
Or you could run this script and send in (via private message, if you want) a list of your mailboxes. It might be clear from that what’s wrong.
I will also try to improve the error reporting in the next version of SpamSieve to help diagnose cases like this.
Michael, thanks for the continued help. Everything seems to be working now. I did in fact click that link to disable remote training. To re-enable it, do I just need to check the box for “Train messages in TrainSpam and TrainGood” (which I have already done) or is there something further to do?