Sonoma mac, latest SS. Training as good does not work, almost ever

This has gotten very, very tiring. I’ve been using SS for years and years. Did the upgrade to v3 and all that. No problems catching spam. Very, very rarely does SS let a spam message through.

My problem is the opposite. I can train good emails as good hundreds of time over a week and they still show up in Spam folder. I made people VIPs, and checked that box, I added them as a Contact on the mac, still spam.

Why? I should be able to say “good” once, and it’s good. Done. I don’t mind training as good, but to do it 50 times, and it still not “take” is making me want to just forget SS and go back to the old mac junk filtering. At least when I said Not Junk, that was the end.

I have one mac on all the time, with SS, and my other macs I do not have SS installed. So it’s only one install at play here.

I attached my main settings screens.

Again, this not a problem with it catching spam. That’s wonderful. It’s a matter of it not actually letting real mail through after endless trainings as Good.



SpamSieve does not move incoming messages to the Spam mailbox on macOS Sonoma. It moves the messages to the Junk mailbox. So it sounds like the problem is with another Mail rule or with a server junk filter, not SpamSieve. For more information, please see this page.

So there’s no more Spam box for Sonoma? Huh. News to me. I must have missed something when I moved to v3

I do not however see a common Junk folder in my mailbox sidebar now.

I can’t believe how complicated this all is to be honest. Not your fault I’m guessing, but still.

Should I just un-install everything and start over?

We’ve been suggesting that people switch to the Junk mailbox since macOS 10.15 (Catalina), but it became mandatory with macOS 14.0 Sonoma. You can still use a separate Spam mailbox to hold the trained spam messages, if you want, but the automatically caught ones need to go to Junk (or Trash).

Apple removed this a few versions ago, but you can get it back by clicking the + button to add a favorite:

and then it will show up like this:

It has always been the case that other rules and filters can catch good messages as spam before SpamSieve sees them. There is no reason to uninstall or start over the because the problem is not related to SpamSieve. I recommend turning off your server spam filter if possible.

If that’s not possible, you should fix your Mail account settings so that Mail uses the same mailbox for junk that the server filter does. And then you could set up SpamSieve to rescue the good messages that the server filter catches.