Safe Boot Oddity - Dock Icon Appears

SpamSieve
,
1

Through the course of doing some troubleshooting, I had to go through the Safe Boot (Safe Mode) process when I restarted my Mac. As expected, none of my startup items or apps launched (including SS).

I then proceeded to do a normal boot. When I returned to my freshly-booted Mac, I saw that SS now has an icon in the dock (was not using that option prior to this series of reboots) and clicking on SS’s dock icon opened SS’s Settings window (to the Apple Mail/Filtering tab). Choosing a different SS Settings tab, closing the window, then clicking the dock icon again opened SS Settings to the last-selected tab.

When I checked the “Advanced” tab, “Show menu bar icon” is checked (as expected); “Show Dock icon” is UNchecked (as expected)–yet SS is quite visible in the Dock.

Quitting and re-launching SS has made the Dock icon disappear (as expected).

I guess I’m just reporting the odd behavior that SS’s Dock icon appeared after a sequence of a Safe Boot, then a ‘normal’ boot.

All under SS 3.0.5 and macOS 15.1 (Intel).

Thanks!

2

The Show Dock icon setting affects whether SpamSieve requests its Dock icon to be visible or hidden, however:

  • This only takes effect when the app is running. Any app that you drag to the Dock will stay visible until the app is launched and it hides its icon.

  • If the System Settings ‣ Dock & Menu Bar ‣ Dock & Menu Bar ‣ Show recent applications in Dock setting is checked, even a “hidden” Dock icon may be visible unless you specifically remove the icon from the Dock (by dragging or from the menu).

I’m not exactly sure what happened in your case, but it may be that SpamSieve had at one point been manually added to the Dock and so it was still here but not hidden after the safe boot because it wasn’t launched.