Apple Mail Rescue Good Messages: Trick to make Mail apply rules to rescued messages?

SpamSieve
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1

I decided to try out Dreamhost’s server-side spam filtering (by MailChannels) since your script Apple Mail - Rescue Good Messages can rescue all of MailChannels’ false positives.

The good news: The script is working perfectly!

The bad news: Mail’s inbox rules don’t get applied to the rescued messages.

Sure, I can select the messages and tell Mail to “apply rules”, but I’m hoping to automate the process. The script is rescuing about 20 retail newsletters (not spam to me, I signed up for 'em) a day. For comparison, I typically get 2–5 spam emails a day (and I’m not even sure how many of those MailChannels is correctly identifying; one motivation for my experiment was to help MailChannels identify the real spam).

It occurs to me that I could create an Apple Script to apply rules to messages in my inbox, but this seems like a bad idea if I can’t make it apply only to rescued messages as they are being moved into the inbox. (My scripting ability is rudimentary at best.)

I’ll probably end up disabling Dreamhost/MailChannels filtering on my domain (my standard practice since forever), but if there’s a smart workaround, please let me know!

2

P.S. It would be nice if SpamSieve stats could show the number of rescued good messages (or I could figure out an easy way to get this number from the logs). Just so I could use the stats to beat up on my webhost. [Grins]

3

Yeah, unfortunately Mail rules are not really scriptable.

This is something I’m working on.

4

Thanks for confirming that there’s little point in scripting. I’ll keep an eye on SpamSieve updates for expanded stats capability.

I’m going to leave MailChannels filtering enabled for a bit longer just to see if it actually correctly identifies any real spam. This should give me more “rescued” stats as well (because, of course, I’ll disable the script when I disable server spam filtering).

Thanks as always! As far as I’m concerned, you are golden.

5

My experiment is at an end. I will be deactivating MailChannels on my domain momentarily.

In the 14 days I had Dreamhost’s implementation of MailChannels active:

  • I believe the volume of spam I have received has gone down (it looks like I have submitted 10 messages to SpamCop for processing/reporting in 14 days.)
  • Since I started checking headers a week ago, I’ve seen one message that MailChannels correctly identified as spam.
  • Rescue Good Messages has probably had to save around 15 false positives a day

My take is that the sole benefit of MailChannels is that it will reject messages which claim to come from domains with DMARC policies set to “reject”. In the absence of a “reject” policy, MailChannels delivers the message, either to the inbox or to the server’s spam folder.

I’m going to be asking Dreamhost if they can get a DMARC-only flavor of MailChannels.

6

Thanks for the follow-up. I also found that MailChannels generated a lot of false positives.