I have started receiving tons of spam email with fake Docusign requests. They all go into the spam folder as they should, but I have also received a couple of angry emails from people thinking they are replying to the spammers but somehow they come to me! Those did not go into the spam folder, so I did “Train as Spam” on them, but of course that only works for that person. I can see my email address in the headers, but I’m not fluent enough in reading headers to figure out exactly what’s going on. I’m on MacOS 15.1 Sequoia. My email address is a sub-address of my mac.com email address. I have no idea how to stop getting emails from randos thinking they’re replying to spammers, and the spammers do not seem to be using bcc. Thanks in advance for any advice.
Do you mean that you and other real people are Cc’d on the same fake Docusign requests? If you go to the Log window, what do the Predicted: Good log entries for these messages look like? (You can copy/paste from the list to grab the essential info.)
Sorry for the delay. The forum email notification went into my spam folder, but it has now been added as a contact. There is no Predicted: Good log entry for the one from yesterday, and it would take me awhile to find the others because it’s been a month or two since I saw those. The one from yesterday only has a log entry for Trained: Spam (Manual). There only seems to be one cc address, and none of the addresses in the Info are mine, so I’m not entirely sure in this particular case that there are other real people. I only saw my email address in the headers. Here is the Info section of the Log. I omitted the last 3 lines since they contain personal info.
Summary: You trained this message as Spam from your mail client.
Prediction: SpamSieve had not previously seen this message. This could be because (a) you were doing an initial training, (b) you had marked the message as read on another device, (c) your mail program was not set up to filter all new messages through SpamSieve, or (d) a server filter had moved the message out of the inbox before it got to your Mac.
Help: Do an Initial Training
Help: Why are other Apple Mail mailboxes not being processed?
Help: Why is SpamSieve not catching my spam?
Corpus Change: Added message to Spam corpus (1,384 total)
Rule Change: Added blocklist rule (461 total): From (address) is equal to “ltcol_ed@me.com”
Rule Change: Added blocklist rule (461 total): From (name) is equal to “Edward J Beverly III”
Date Logged: Yesterday at 4:08:46 PMSubject: Re: Primary account alert: review transactions immediately
with Docusign: H77pp17AUssH
From: Edward J Beverly III ltcol_ed@me.com
Date Sent: Yesterday at 4:00:04 PM
Date Received: Yesterday at 4:00:39 PM
To: royjose486@gmail.com
Size: 25 KB (10 KB compressed)
Identifier: 5S1sEXtazv/0u6bWb5xS+w==
Server Filter: There is no record of a server junk filter evaluating this message. Some mail servers don’t have junk filters, and some filters move messages to a different mailbox without noting in the message that they did this.
Origin: iCloud (IMAP) ‣ Junk in Mail 16.0 (SpamSieve menu)Processing Time: 0.061s
SpamSieve: 3.0.5 at /Applications/SpamSieve.app
SpamSieve will not classify its own forum messages as spam unless you’ve trained them as spam. So most likely the message was moved to Junk by a server spam filter. Adding a macOS contact will not help with that. You would need to configure the filter directly (by logging into its Web interface) or turn it off or set SpamSieve to rescue the good messages.
This seems to indicate that either the message was received in a mailbox that you had told SpamSieve not to filter or that you trained the message as spam before SpamSieve had seen it. It may be that filtering is working but delayed. You can use the Add green flag to unread good messages option to investigate this.
I’m confused because it looks like this message was already in Junk when you trained it as spam, yet you had said that the message wasn’t automatically filtered.
- This was the first time I had received a forum message, so it must’ve been like you said, where a server spam filter moved it. I always thought that adding something as a contact would help, so thanks for that bit of info. I will also set it to rescue good messages.
- I saw the message and trained it as spam almost as soon as it was received, so it is very possible that SpamSieve had not seen it yet. I’ll try your suggestion of add green flag to unread good messages, too.
- I had indeed moved it to Junk as soon as I saw it, and then trained it as spam.
Thank you for the advice. Usually I can figure out what’s going on with spam, but this one has been confusing. And I’m always learning something new about SpamSieve!