I’m running SpamSieve 3.2.2 on my 27” 5K iMac, running Mac OS 15.7.3 over Open Core Legacy Patcher 2.4.1. My email client is Apple Mail.
I’m suspecting that my SpamSieve isn’t running properly, but I have no way to know for sure.
Lately I’ve been receiving a wave of SPAM messages that seem to be related to a phishing campaign. I know because they “suposedly” come from respectable companies, but they are full of gramatical errors and they all have somewhere to click.
I know a little about these things because I’ve been in technology for over 25 years and I actually published a 12-video course about phishing campaigns. So I don’t click on anything.
The emails come from companies like Marriott, Costco, Tractor Supply, FreshStore and Omaha Steaks.
The funny thing is that I mark them all as SPAM, your software puts them all in the TRASH folder (because that’s the way that I programmed it), and the next day —sure enough— they’re back in my mail folders.
Now, I have several theories:
Your software stopped working.
The bad guys are using some kind of rotating IP application that keeps fooling SpamSieve day after day.
They’ve found some other way of fooling SpamSieve.
Your software used to be foolproof. In fact, I used to promote it on my radio show and podcast. I wasn’t even an affiliate. I just did it because it was so good.
But now, it seems like I’ve put up giant sign that says: “SPAMMERS WELCOME”.
I don’t know whether that’s the case here, but the most common cause for this behavior is not training all the mistakes. A lot of people will train some but skip others, or not see them because they get moved by other Mail rules, or delete them on their phone instead of moving them to the TrainSpam mailbox or training them when they get back to their Mac. Not correcting mistakes is like telling SpamSieve that you do want to see more of those messages.
Since you’re a longtime user, it’s also possible that SpamSieve’s training data has gotten bogged down with stuff that’s no longer relevant, and it’s time to reset the corpus and retrain with a smaller number of recent messages.
But before jumping to any conclusions, I recommend following the instructions on this page to make sure everything is still set up correctly and (if it seems to be) to send us a diagnostic report to investigate further.
For the spam senders you mentioned, the sender’s address varies slightly each time, so they aren’t detected by SpamSieve. To deal with this, I set up rules in Mail to move messages based on criteria such as content, subject line, and so on.
We recommendnot creating additional rules in Mail to filter out spam. Such rules make it hard for you to correct SpamSieve mistakes, leading to the problem with incorrect training as described above. It’s better to create rules in SpamSieve’s Blocklist.
That said, the whole point of SpamSieve is that it doesn’t rely on simple rules like that. If you find it necessary to create lots of rules, that’s usually an indication that something is wrong with the setup or training, or perhaps that the messages are triggering SpamSieve bug. I recommend checking for uncorrected mistakes in the Corpus window, and please send in a diagnostic report if that doesn’t fix the problem.
Well, in my case it doesn’t. I can’t figure it out so I’m already looking for a different solution. For now, I’m just removing them by hand as they arrive.
I’m not sure what you did before that didn’t work, but the above post did.
In any case, the main issue seems to be a setup problem. SpamSieve isn’t even looking at most of the incoming messages because you have Mail rules that move them out of the inbox before SpamSieve sees them. Each time you train one of these as spam, the Log window is probably showing something like this:
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.
If you want it to filter other mailboxes such as Accurate Communications ‣ Accurate Communications - Sales you would need to select those mailboxes in the Filter spam messages in other mailboxes sheet in the settings.
