Beachball when deleting a spam message

As mentioned above, please use the Change Settings command to tell SpamSieve that you want to use a Spam mailbox on your mail server, rather than a local one.

Apple Mail; Big Sur. Not every time.

I always have. Also when I train (or retrain in my case), I get a 15 second spinning beachball before it stops.
If I change from local to server, will I still have the ability to check locally to make sure good email didn’t go in there?

You always have what?

To see what’s causing this, please record samples from both Mail and SpamSieve during the beachball.

Yes, you will see the Spam mailbox and messages in Mail.

So Spam Sieve has pretty much been useless on Big Sur for me. Does not work nicely like it did on Mojave. I know you are wrestling with the issue. I used to be able to just look at “All inboxes” (I have many emails) and not see any spam unless I went to Junk or Spam. Now I see it all, only highlighted with grey or blue. I have to go to each individual email now to see it organized.
Truthfully, it’s a mess. I just want it to work like it did on Mojave with no messing with settings.
Is this no longer possible?
The long spinning beachball when training a message is not an option.
You had a great program, and I know Apple threw a curveball at you with Big Sur.

For most users, it works exactly the same as with previous versions of macOS. In some cases, with Catalina or Big Sur, due to a bug in Apple Mail, you will need to change the settings to use a server Spam mailbox instead of a local one. That should only take a minute or two. If you are having trouble doing this, please let me know where you are getting stuck.

No one else has reported a spinning beachball when training. As I said, I can look into this if you record samples from both Mail and SpamSieve during the beachball.

It’s simply a 1 minute or more spinning beachball when I click to train it as spam. A screenshot video will not enlighten you any more.

I know you explained that the mailbox settings needed to be changed, and I thought I did this.

If no one else is having any issue, probably best for me to delete Spam Sieve, rebuild mailboxes and possibly try again with a fresh install after a month or so.

Path of least resistance. Bigger fish to fry in my daily work tasks.

If you follow the link above, it explains how to record a sample using Activity Monitor. This is not a video but rather a listing that shows which parts of the code Mail and/or SpamSieve are getting stuck in.

Perhaps I should verify that that’s done. Please use the Save Diagnostic Report command in the Help menu and send me the report file, as described here.

Also, do you have more than one Mail account?

That is unlikely to fix either of the issues that you mentioned. I instead recommend proceeding as I described above.

Attached is the diagnostic report. Any time I select an email to train as spam, I get spinning beachball for quite a while.

SpamSieve Diagnostic Report.tbz

Thanks for sending the report. It shows that both the Mail rule and Change Settings are still set to use a local Spam mailbox. As previously noted, you need to choose a server mailbox in order to avoid the Bug Sur bug where Mail doesn’t move the messages.

In order to investigate the hang, please record samples from both Mail and SpamSieve during the beachball.

No change after making what I think were the correct changes.

(Attachment SpamSieve Diagnostic Report.tbz is missing)

Sample of SpamSieve.txt (102 KB)

Could you try sending it directly to spamsieve-fn@c-command.com?

Thanks for the sample. It looks like SpamSieve was idle during this time. Could you record a sample of Mail during the beachball?

Thanks for re-sending the diagnostic report. It looks like you’ve successfully set SpamSieve to move messages to a server Spam mailbox when you train them. However, the rule in Apple Mail is still set to move incoming messages to a local Spam mailbox. That’s probably why you didn’t notice a change.

If you are still getting a beachball when training, please record a sample from Mail during that time.

Where is server Spam? (see screenshot)

To clarify: I don’t have any other spam folder listed except for that one. Even under iCloud, I only have a junk folder

You could either create separate rules for each account to use its own Junk mailbox (if you don’t mind SpamSieve spam being mixed with messages caught by your server filter) or create new Spam mailbox(es).

I created a new “spam” box on the iCloud server. Set rules so that SpamSieve marked spam goes into that folder.
Now when I open mail for the first time, I can see spam going into that folder, but then disappearing one after another. Folder is essentially always empty except for a “welcome to iCloud” message.

I can still see all the spam marked messages in my “all mailboxes”, just marked with various levels of gray.

This sounds like the Mail bug where it deletes messages instead of moving them to a different account. Please make sure that you have separate rules so that each account’s messages are moved to a Spam mailbox in the same account.

That did not work at all, now all messages that I mark as spam disappear completely.

That’s not related to what happens when you train a message as spam. Training is configured via the Change Settings command. Another way to possibly work around the Mail-not-moving-messages bug is to click this link.