I use Apple Mail under Sonoma 14.3.1, and I ask because while SpamSieve 3.03 prevents 99.9% of spam from showing up in my Inbox, and once trained they don’t appear in my inbox again, my Junk mailbox is a different story.
In that mailbox I see multiple copies of the exact same spam from several senders, over and over again. So let me ask again, is there any point at which a particular spammy email will no longer show up in Junk?
With the standard configuration the spam will always go to Junk. You can use the Move it to the Trash if the spam score is at least setting:
to make the more spammy messages go to Trash.
Thanks but I assume that that doesn’t stop me getting multiple copies of the exact same spam from several senders, over and over again, and it also puts some really obnoxious stuff in the trash, whereas I never want to see it again.
I could be wrong but in SpamSieve 2 when I trained something as spam I don’t think I ever saw the same spam again.
Do I have any options?
Correct—it doesn’t change which messages you receive, just which mailbox they end up in.
No, it was the same with SpamSieve 2.
Well, something has changed. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been getting dozens of spam messages a day in my Junk mailbox which accumulate until I get sick of seeing them and I use a mail rule to remove them. I am 100% certain that I never had to do that before. Please assume that I’m not crazy.
There has never been a SpamSieve feature to prevent you from receiving messages or to delete them sight-unseen. It’s certainly possible that you used to have a server filter or another rule that you created that was doing that.
Currently I created (but am not using) several Apple mail rules that look for specific things like “$”, “casino”, “urgent”, etcetera which look like this
but I would need many more to catch all the different situations. Can you suggest a more general rule?
My advice is not to try to do this. Rules like this that are broad enough to be useful tend to end up deleting good messages by accident.
Also, you probably don’t want to use the Message is junk mail condition. I don’t see how that would be helpful here.
Okay I’ve created a gmail server filter for spam. I never did that before and I never had a spam rule in Apple mail so I still say something is wrong.
If I wanted to start SpamSieve completely from scratch, can you direct me to a “how to”?
You could uninstall it (and be sure to do the “Removing SpamSieve’s Data Files” part) and then reinstall. But nothing you’ve described sounds like a problem that this would fix. You already said it was filtering properly, and reinstalling is not going to make SpamSieve do something that it was never designed to do.
Is there any kind of “just in case” backup I should do before uninstalling?
I think I am missing something. From what you said, it sounds like my preferences ought to cause SpamSieve to filter messages that are in the Junk mailbox and put them in trash.
It does not. I still get hundreds of emails in the Junk folder every day. I still have the script we figured out to manually filter the Junk mailbox, and it still works, but if there is a way to filter messages that are in the Junk folder without running a script, I’d much rather do that.
Hi Martin - This happened to me a year or so ago. My email obviously went into a new pool of spammers and my Junk email skyrocketed. That is why I got SpamSieve - I really couldn’t review hundreds of spam emails a day. Michael helped me create a script to filter everything in the Junk mailbox, move the actual junk in there to trash, and mark it read. It gets 90%-95% of the spam, so I only have to review 20 or so messages.
I do not ever see most of the script-filtered messages because they go in the trash and are marked read, and I don’t go look at them. I agree a lot of them are gross or unsettling and I don’t know why Apple doesn’t do a better job of filtering them in the first place.
I left a comment for Michael below asking about how to automate this. If it doesn’t work I can send you my script if you like.
No thanks because with my SpamSieve setup all spam goes into Junk. I’ve written several Apple Mail rules that make most of my spam disappear and I like that much better than moving them to trash where someone else using my computer might come across them.
Marty
The settings in your screenshot will make SpamSieve move the more spammy messages (score of 90/100) directly to Trash instead of Junk. This does not affect messages that were moved to Junk by a server junk filter (which you can identify by their lack of background color).
I think we set up the rescue script to move messages that the server junk filter moved to Junk to Trash. The script will run automatically if you attach it to a rule.
