Mystery Spam Banishing

SpamSieve
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1

For some reason, emails from Howard Oakley at The Eclectic Light Company have all suddenly been sent to the Spam folder. This is entirely new.

I looked in the Log, and there is no indication that SpamSieve put them there. There is no entry in the Blocklist for that would suggest that he’s in Spam purgatory. I retrained his emails as good in SpamSieve and those actions appear in the Log, as expected.

So, that suggests that the Yahoo server for that email account is the culprit, right? I just now made my semi-annual visit to the Yahoo web portal to check on things and the setting for allowlisting all emails is set as suggested in the SpamSieve documentation - no change.

Any ideas? I’m kind of stumped.

Separately, Apple Mail continues to act stupid at times. What appears to happen is that a second instance of the application just appears and the beachball of death starts spinning. When I force-quit, there is still an instance of Mail running. Usually. This appears to be the everlasting bug I’ve had for years, over a few generations of macOS. I have no hope of that ever changing. So, does anybody here have an opinion of MailMaven? Easy to migrate to from Apple Mail? Severe bugs? The only new feature I’m really interested in is reliability. I’m not sophisticated enough or have so much email that my current mail management approaches don’t work pretty well.

2

Yes, unless you have another rule in Mail or perhaps another Mac that’s filtering the messages.

I’ve heard mixed reports that Yahoo no longer allows user-created filters to override their spam filter. So you may want to just set up SpamSieve to rescue the messages from Junk.

I’ve only used it for testing, but from what I’ve seen and what other SpamSieve users have reported, it seems to work well.

3

Nope. No other filters. So, your reports must have some validity. I will try your rescue suggestion.

Thanks for the terse MailMaven review. Actually, not hearing about any bugs is a good sign, right?

Thanks for all.

4

I just received another email from Howard, informing everybody about an update to XProtect. Rather than do anything inside my own Mail app, I logged onto the Yahoo web portal. Sure enough, Howard’s email was sent to their Spam folder. So, it is Yahoo.

5

Update.

I just revisited Yahoo’s settings.

From your Manual:

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image868×1500 79.7 KB

Where it shows “Choose a folder to move to” there is now no selection of Inbox in the pull down menu to the left. If I try to manually type in “Inbox” to the box on the right, and save, I get the message that Inbox cannot be created. Or something like that. In fact, if I just cancel out of that setting, I get an error message that the folder can’t be created.

I realize that this issue was brought up probably six months ago, but it seems to have gotten worse. I tried manually typing Inbox in a number of times with no luck.

A little checking around reveals that Yahoo has indeed eliminated the possibility to redirect mails to Inbox. They are considering bringing the option back, but I am not holding my breath. Generally, people are not happy.

What is it about Mail services that they keep making things worse? (Cory Doctorow is right?) I’d think that Yahoo would want to reduce email stuffed away in Spam folders on their servers by allowing them to be moved offline. Maybe not.

OK, done whining.

6

I’ve been using MailMaven for nearly a year, I guess, and I have found it to be a solid replacement for Apple’s Mail. It remains a little rough around the edges, but there is a lot to like.

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7

I’ll chime in as one of their beta testers.. MailMaven is excellent.. as soon as I can find a replacement (or code one) for an extension I use in Apple Mail I’ll be switching over to their client. I only wish they would do a lifetime license but at least their subscription model is reasonable (give I used their prior apple mail plugin products).

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