In a sense this is a follow-up from my previous question, where I describe my SpamSieve setup with two macs running SpamSieve at the same time:
The support page on running SpamSieve on multiple macs suggests 4 options, none of which are very satisfying for my use case:
- Run SpamSieve on a single Mac and let it clean your inbox for all the Macs. All the training is done from that Mac. This is the simplest solution. It works well when the Mac with SpamSieve will be running most of the time, and when you can easily access that Mac to do the training.
Doesn’t work for me. My old Mac is slow and unreliable, sometimes shutting down for no reason such that I have to reboot it when I’m home. So I also want SpamSieve to run on my (new) daily driver Mac, so I get the best / quickest Spam filtering experience when working. But I also don’t want to only run on the new Mac, since when I’m on the go and the new Mac isn’t running (or doesn’t have internet connection) I don’t want to see Spam on my phone.
- Run SpamSieve on a single Mac using the drone setup. This setup works well when the Mac with SpamSieve will be running most of the time. When you’re away from that Mac, you can remotely train SpamSieve from any Mac, iOS device, or even via Web mail.
Doesn’t work for me for the same reason as above. Also, it would lose the convenience of interacting with SpamSieve, e.g. the shortcuts to train as Good or Bad.
- Run SpamSieve on all the Macs and uncheck the Auto-train as needed preference (on all the Macs). You can train whichever Mac you happen to be using at the moment. This will have lower filtering accuracy than (1) or (2) but is useful in situations when you do not have a single Mac that is always available for mail filtering. With auto-training off, you may find it especially helpful to enable allowlisting of previous recipients.
This is somewhat my setup, but it isn’t ideal, as it’s somewhat cumbersome to train the correct Mac when filtering isn’t working. I keep having to connect to the older Mac to train it when it makes a mistake. Having to turn off auto-training is also a clear downside.
- Run SpamSieve on all the Macs, being careful to only let one copy of SpamSieve run at a time, and to always correct all the mistakes before switching to another Mac. This will give better filtering accuracy than (3) but is a lot more work.
This would be even more effort to coordinate in my case.
What I would really want is for the multiple SpamSieve instances to share the same training data. Then I could just use my new laptop to train SpamSieve, and when that is turned off, the old one would still filter out messages based on the same training data. I could correct mistakes only on the new laptop and would never have to log into the old one to keep it’s training data current.
In my particular setup, I would be perfectly happy with a one-way sync, where only one machine acts as a “primary” instance, and all other sync’d “secondary” instances only receive updates to the training data via sync’ing. The secondary instances would not update the training data themselves, i.e. you’d have to correct mistakes on the primary instance only.
For sync’ing data, iCloud would make sense, or else any other file-based sync’ing software such as Dropbox.
Do you think adding such a feature in the future would be possible?