I have been a SpamSeive user for a long time, though probably under a different email to which I no longer have access. Probably in the past couple of months, I have noticed that each and every time I open Mail, the Training box pops up, even though my use of SpamSieve is long-established. I have trained many current emails and every email that pops up in the Junk file–such as the one that came to me when I started this new account–and no difference shows up. Is it because I use Apple Beta software, and much of the new stuff seems to be particularly buggy? I also use SS beta software, too.
SpamSieve shows the Welcome window and help if you have not trained it with at least one good message and one spam message. How many messages of each type does the Statistics window say are in the corpus?
Filtered Mail
1,394 Good Messages
0 Spam Messages (0%)
0 Spam Messages Per Day
SpamSieve Accuracy
0 False Positives
0 False Negatives (0%)
100.0% Correct
Corpus
250 Good Messages
0 Spam Messages (0%)
63,580 Total Words
Rules
1,566 Allowlist Rules
31 Blocklist Rules
Showing Statistics Since
6/27/26, 12:01 PM
It doesn’t look like you’ve trained it with any spam messages.
Also, you can see from the colors and Log window that SpamSieve is not the reason these good messages went to Junk. So they are not SpamSieve mistakes and do not need to be trained as good.
The wonderful thing about Mail is I do not get any spam messages. None. Even in my Google account, which I port over to Mail, none make their way. I just checked the browser link to gmail.com, and I see I have 584 spam messages in there right now. Not one of them came through. I guess I will just keep looking for at least one spam message, and clicking all those boxes closed when they open. I have been using and paying for SpamSeive for years, and I see no reason to change
James Wilkinson
That’s not a feature of Mail; it sounds like a bug or misconfiguration if it’s not showing the same messages as gmail.com.
I waited to reply until I had a couple of spam messages—I do not get many—and I still get the popup training items each time.
The Statistics file still shows 0 spam for some reason. I’ll keep working on it…this is the only time I actually WANT spam!
Did you use the Train as Spam command (vs. the one that says Junk, which is for Mail’s filter) to train the spams?
Yes. I used the icon at the top, not the TrainSpam mailbox
Either of those is fine. Do you see the Log window that it says you trained those messages? Or is it reporting errors?
I just checked the Log file; nothing shows ANY spam being Trained: Spam, all the way back to June. Lots of Predicted: Good, Trained: Good (Manual) and Trained: Good (Auto), but nothing with “spam” in the Type. There was nothing with error in any of them. I will just keep waiting for the next spam message.
To continue with new information, just now, an email from an outside company, known to me, but never before received, came to my Mail Junk file. I used the icon to identify it as Good, and after a second or two with activity from Mail, the message moved into the Inbox. But checking on Statistics, it still shows 0% spam messages, up and down the list.
The Log window will say whether SpamSieve predicted that message to be spam. If not, it was probably moved to Junk by a server filter (and so it won’t count under Statistics ‣ Filtered Mail).
If you train the message as good, it will count in the Corpus ‣ Good Messages section of the Statistics window.