I am new to Spamsieve and 7 days into a trial period using with Outlook for Mac 2016 and Mac Mojave OSX. I have followed the setup guide for my version of Outlook, but wondering if something isn’t right. Even my email from C-Command to confirm my email address to this forum went into my InboxSpamsieve. I realise I’m in training mode, but what I’m puzzled about is that I’m getting more false positives and negatives than what seems to show up in the statistics. How long does it normally take to improve the success rate? I really want this to work. I have mainly IMAP accounts and 1 gmail account. The stats say only 1 false positive and 2 false negatives. I wish. It’s claiming 94.4% correct. All the outlook scripts are running correctly.
It’s normal for all new messages to go to the InboxSpamSieve folder. That is where messages are temporarily held until they have been processed by SpamSieve. Then it will move the good ones to the inbox and the spam ones to the Junk folder, and the InboxSpamSieve folder will be empty.
If you are seeing messages collect in the InboxSpamSieve folder, please make sure that the Outlook - Filter Mailboxes app is running (Step 5).
A false positive is a good message that SpamSieve moves to Junk and that you train as good.
A false negative is a spam message that SpamSieve moves to the inbox and that you train as spam.
So if you don’t correct SpamSieve or if the message was moved to Junk by some other filter, those are not counted as SpamSieve mistakes.
If your perception of the filtering accuracy is not matching the Statistics window, I think it’s best to look at individual messages to see how they were counted. You can do this by looking in the log, or I can help if you send in a diagnostic report.
Many thanks you for your reply. I do have the outlook filter mailboxes running. I have been correcting Spamsieve. Not all messages have been going to the inboxspamsieve folder. I have had many more false negatives than shown in the stats. I will send you the log now. .
The log shows that the messages you’ve been training as spam had not been previously examined by SpamSieve. So they are not false negatives, and the stats are probably correct.
Additionally, the ones you’ve been training as good were not classified as spam by SpamSieve. It had not looked at those messages at all. They were probably moved to Junk by a server junk filter before they got to your Mac. If you don’t want that to happen, you could turn off the server filter.
It sounds like the problem is that not all your new messages are going to the InboxSpamSieve folder, so SpamSieve isn’t seeing them. Please check your Outlook rules to make sure that they are set up to move all the incoming messages to InboxSpamSieve.
Thanks for the feedback. Much appreciated. I hadn’t totally understood how it worked, but I do now. With some email accounts the messages are indeed not first going to the inboxspamsieve. I’ve seen that now and I will check that. Other accounts are working fine. I don’t think any mails are going to Junk by another filter. Thank you again.
All is working well now.
Great, thanks for the follow-up.