When I searched for a keyword, I found that over 1500 emails, going back years and years, were in the spam folder and marked ‘unread’.
Taking a closer look, they were – in reality – read before and sometimes even labeled by me, except for some of the last few weeks.
When I selected and then hit ‘Train as Good’ larger numbers of them at a time, I noticed SpamSieve could not handle too much of them at a time.
My question is: What happend and how do I prevent it from happening again?
It can’t be just accidentally selecting them and dragging or hitting ‘Train as spam’ because then they wouldn’t be unread. Also, I doubt that SpamSieve could have even executed that, since it can’t handle much smaller numbers of mail messages to be Trained as Good. Also, the mails don’t seem to have anything in common, not even the to: field, so it seems impossible that they were gathered by a search, then marked unread, then moved to the Spam folder, without me noticing anything.
By the way, I must add that Mail doesn’t seem to hold the column widths I set. Could it be that either Mail or SpamSieve is on the fritz?
Sorry, I thought ‘label’ was the term used in the English version (I’m Dutch), but I guess it’s ‘marked’, with a colored flag.
When selecting too much (sometimes 20 were too much, sometimes 50 worked fine) messages for Train as Good, there would simply be no changes any more. The messages would stay in place. The first one would sometimes (but not always) be greyed out and no longer react to anything. After another attempt, a second message title was greyed out. After restarting Mail they looked normal again and Mail would react normal again. This happened a few times. So I went on with smaller batches until I had them all.
Looking at the log, it seems that all messages in the Spam folder were evaluated on September 8th, 2024 and June 14th, 28th of March, and their original date of sending, which can be earlier or later. There often are even more evaluations. The log also marks all except one as ‘Herhaalde voorspelling: SpamSieve heeft dit bericht al geclassificeerd.’ or in English: ‘Repeated prediction: SpamSieve already classified this message’. Some logs have an additional line: ‘Opgevolgde voorspelling: SpamSieve markeerde dit bericht later nog eens.’ meaning as much as 'Followed up prediction: SpamSieve marked this message again later.
PS
I noticed SpamSieve not working this summer, so I re-installed it on my desktop. I must add that I also use it on a 2013 MacBook Pro, that I still use occasionally. It’s obviously stuck on an older version of macOS. If I remember correctly, I didn’t have to re-install SpamSieve it there. I remember reading in the manual that it was better to keep the SpamSieve rule in the Mail app for older Mail/SpamSieve versions, so I did.
I noticed last week that another rule, that I’ve been using for years and years, didn’t seem to work any more. The rule simply moves mail to the thrash that are send to a series of mail addresses. In reality, I only have one, catch-all mailbox.
I tested with the rule on and off but don’t understand why it doesn’t work. It is first in line. When I select messages in the inbox and ‘apply rules’, the rules DO work. Newly incoming messages don’t seem to be effected by the rule though.
That would seem to indicate that SpamSieve on this Mac did not move them there, or that it did some time ago and since then Mail lost the color information…
Interesting—I have not seen that happen before. Does the entire batch show up in the log as Trained: Spam (Manual) even though they didn’t move in Mail?
Also, I’m unsure what you mean by “greyed out.” Is that referring to the text color? SpamSieve only changes the background color to gray when you train a message as spam. I wonder if the grey is indicating that Mail has marked the message as deleted in that mailbox because it’s moving it. Is the message that you trained in the special Junk mailbox, and is that set to be stored on the mail server or On My Mac?
Do they say Predicted: Good or Predicted: Spam in the Type column?
Recent ones?
Is the rule marked as inactive on the Sequoia Mac? Is it possible that the messages were moved by the older Mac?
Are they arriving in the inbox or in another mailbox?
Thank you for trying to get to the bottom of this together. I’m thinking of a complete reset of Mail and re-installing SpamSieve, but on the other hand this machine is set up ‘only’ a year ago, what makes me wonder what might be corrupted. I’ve never had something like this before, even on a machine running for a decade without re-installng.
If it’s helpful, you can have my log files. Just let me know how you’d like to receive them.
I looked into the log file on my other Mac, running Big Sur 11.7.10 and SpamSieve 3.1. ‘Other’ Mail has the SpamSieve rule active to move every message to the Spam folder, but even if this would’ve gone bonkers, it doesn’t explain why one email was moved from my inbox and another wasn’t.
Looking in both the desktop and macbook/other log for today’s mail/spam handling, it seems that on the macbook, the rule that filters out known, spammy to: addresses works. Those were put in the On my Mac / Incoming / Deleted Messages folder.
Then the Macbook SpamSieve correctly put five spammy mails in the On my Mac / Incoming / Spam folder (and colored the subject lines). So far, so good.
Some messages were predicted being ‘good’. Interestingly, one about work-life-balance was predicted being ‘good’ (score: 27)on the Macbook, but scored 73 on the desktop.
On the desktop Mac therefore, it was put in the folder Incoming / [let’s say it’s laptopleon] / Junkmail. With a yellow background colored subject line.
This is confusing because it sounds like you are simultaneously running two different copies of SpamSieve but you have them set to move the spam messages to different mailboxes. Are you following one of the multi-Mac setups described here?
In any case, if you have a question about a particular message you can look it up in the Log window on both Macs.
I’m afraid you are correct, I realise that now. Since the desktop is my main machine and I will replace it soon, I have decided to remove SpamSieve from the laptop entirely.
There often are even more evaluations.
Recent ones?
No, those were always in the past, even before the three dates that always were mentioned.
When I tried to train a bunch as spam, sometimes there would be no reaction. Not even a spinning beach ball. (It’s a M3 Mac Studio so I assume there is plenty of computing time available but there can always be issues, right?). Then the first subject line would get grey tekst. At first I thought it just needed a minute, but it would stay like that. The greyed out mail could not be selected any more, the rest could. So I tried to train another block of mails and again the first one would become grey and un-selectable. At that point I restarted Mail and they would look normal again.
I think they all got trained as spam but I can’t say for sure which few it were since all 1500+ mails got moved in the end.
I now also discovered that there a 1300 mails that belong to my main email account, in a different (domain) mail account that I hardly ever use. I have no idea how they they got in the wrong mailbox.
I also found that one mail I moved from my iPhone, as a test, is still in the iPhone incoming mail, yet not on my Mac, laptop and webmail version of that account.
I have never really understood the rather elaborate tree structure that lives in the left column of Mail.
Considering all the factors, I think it would be best to make sure I have a backup or two, reset Mail’s preferences and re-install SpamSieve after re-reading the manual. Thanks again for your patience.
Do you have / know a thorough guide with best practises for re-installing Mail?
Update: I couldnt help myself and investigated some more. I now know the 1300 mails in the wrong mail account inbox belonged to the 1500+ set that were all moved thrice and were in the Spam folder two days ago, untill I trained them as ‘good’ again.
Were you using the menu command or keyboard shortcut? I would not expect a spinning beachball, even if it gets stuck, because SpamSieve does the training from a background thread. You could record a sample to see what SpamSieve or Mail is doing or check the Log window for errors and status information.
I’m not sure what would cause that other than a rule or human interaction. SpamSieve doesn’t move incoming or trained spam messages across accounts.
If the iPhone mailbox doesn’t match Webmail, that would seem to indicate a problem with Mail on the iPhone, since Webmail shows the “truth.”
I used the ‘train as good’ keyboard shortcut, to get the mails back in the inbox and because I thought the local SpamSieve was misjudging them and also out of habit, I guess.
I’m sorry for being so tardy in my reaction, but I can now say with confidence that, since I disabled SpamSieve on the my old laptop, SpamSieve and Mail seem to be working fine, without rebuilding Mail or emptying the SpamSieve on my desktop machine.
