I’ve been completely dissatisfied with the way that SpamSieve interacts with Microsoft Outlook for Mac, ver. 16.16.20 (200307). The scripts are useless and unreliable. Train as Good, doesn’t. Email from the same sender will be in Junk next time, too. Same for Train as Spam. Now, I’m getting more emails in my Junk folder than are showing up in the Inbox and they’re all good senders.
Now that I’ve voiced my concerns, I want to completely unlink SpamSieve to my Outlook account. It works very reliably with Apple Mail, so I don’t want to delete the whole program, just not have it do any filtering for Outlook. Please tell me how to do that. I tried deleting the scripts, but they still show up on the menu bar even though they’re not in the Applications folder. I tried deleting the SpamSieve rule in Outlook, but email still is getting filtered incorrectly by something. I can’t access the Junk preferences in Outlook, because “this feature is not available for the account.”
I’m sorry to hear that. If you send in a diagnostic report I can take a look at what happened there. It sounds like the messages were probably moved to Junk by a server junk filter, not SpamSieve.
It’s sufficient to delete any SpamSieve rules that you created in Outlook and to delete (or simply not launch) the Outlook Filter Mailboxes app.
The scripts are stored at /Users/<username>/Library/Scripts/Applications/Microsoft Outlook, as described in Uninstalling SpamSieve.
Since the messages are still being filtered even without the SpamSieve rule, this again points to the problem being a server junk filter. You would need to configure that from the web rather than from within Outlook.
Thanks for sending the diagnostic report. The log shows that none of the messages that you trained as good were ones that SpamSieve had classified as spam. So they were likely moved to Junk by a server junk filter.
The log, which goes back to February 25, does not show any messages that you trained as spam. Were you perhaps using Outlook’s Mark as Junk command rather than the SpamSieve - Train as Spam command?
After completing uninstalling SpamSieve, Outlook for Mac 2016 is still incorrectly filtering email. After Michael’s last reply, I contacted Microsoft support. They sent me to this support article. In a nutshell, starting with Outlook for Mac 2016, all junk mail filtering is done server-side. Nothing done client-side will sync with the mail server. I don’t know how your Outlook scripts work, but it appears to me that suspect email arrives to my Outlook email app with a Junk label already attached. For SpamSieve to function properly, it would have to identify that label and strip it off before performing a new filtering process unbiased by the server-side label AND remember that sender so future emails from the same sender are again stripped of the Junk label. This process would have to repeated over and over since the server-side never syncs with any junk filtering done on the client-side. I believe I understand better why SpamSieve doesn’t work very well with Outlook for Mac 2016. It’s trying to fix something on the client-side that’s already been done incorrectly on the server-side.
P.S.–It appears from that same support article that the Mark as Junk (or Good) commands do almost nothing in Outlook for Mac 2016, unless you connect to an Exchange server. Why they even exist are a mystery. I don’t need a command that moves an email to Junk once, but never again automatically.
That simply means that Outlook no longer has its own built-in junk mail filter. The SpamSieve instructions have always recommended turning off other client-side filters, so this change doesn’t make a difference when using SpamSieve.
That is not correct. Moving messages on the client moves them on the server, and some servers filters will learn from that. In other words, they will interpret messages being moved into the server Spam mailbox as spam and messages being moved out of it as good.
The primary purpose of SpamSieve is to get spam messages out of your inbox. This works perfectly with Outlook 2016. Having a server-side filter just means that there may be a little less work for SpamSieve to do because some spam will already have been moved out of the inbox before it got to your Mac.
SpamSieve has a feature where it can rescue good messages that were incorrectly caught by a server filter. Currently, this works with Apple Mail but not Outlook. But the best solution, if you have a server-side filter that’s misbehaving, is to turn it off. Some server filters can also be configured (from the web) to always accept messages from certain addresses that are important to you.
To recap from your original post in this thread:
There was no problem with Train as Good. It was the server filter, not SpamSieve, that was getting rid of your good messages. This has nothing to do with Outlook vs. Apple Mail since the server filter applies regardless of which client you are using.
The reason some spam messages were getting through to your inbox is that you were using Outlook’s Mark as Junk command (which basically does nothing) instead of SpamSieve’s Train as Spam command.