Here’s a new beta version of SpamSieve. The changes are:
Updated SpamSieve’s application icon for macOS 26 and the new Liquid Glass design language. It no longer appears in “squircle jail” and now adapts as you change the macOS appearance to use the Dark, Clear, and Tinted icon styles. (The icon in this beta is still a work in progress.)
There is now built-in support for training SpamSieve while away from your Mac or when using a Mac e-mail client that SpamSieve doesn’t integrate with directly. If you go to the Settings ‣ Apple Mail ‣ Training window and select Train messages in TrainSpam and TrainGood, you can train SpamSieve from an iPhone (or other device) by moving messages into the special TrainSpam or TrainGood mailbox. Simply deleting spam messages to get them out of your inbox would lead SpamSieve to think they were good, reducing its filtering accuracy. We used to recommend training spam messages in the inbox when you got back to your Mac. Now you can train SpamSieve remotely, which immediately gets the spams out of view and improves SpamSieve’s filtering of future messages. There’s more information about how this works in the Drone Setup and Remote Training section of the manual.
On November 1, 2025, Microsoft will remove AppleScript support from Outlook. Until this is restored (currently scheduled for December 2025), SpamSieve will not be able to directly work with Outlook. However, you will still be able to use SpamSieve to filter your mail (via Apple Mail) and you’ll still be able to train it from Outlook (via the remote training mentioned above). There’s a lot more information about this in the End of Support for Legacy Outlook section of the manual. The Settings ‣ Outlook ‣ Setup window will now show a link to this help page if Outlook filtering is enabled.
Made various changes to improve SpamSieve’s filtering accuracy.
Selecting or deleting large numbers of rules or log entries is faster and uses much less memory.
I think building in the drone feature, so that we don’t have to configure an AppleScript to run as an addition Mail rule, is a great idea. It might be good to include, along with the new instructions, instructions for undoing the old setup! It took me quite a while to remember where the old script lived.
Thanks Michael. It’s working well. Only thing I’m finding that is odd: when I move a message to either TrainSpam or TrainGood, it ends up correctly in the appropriate folders (Spam or Inbox, respectively), but on my iPhone running the release candidate for iOS 26, the messages are moved but a copy remains in these Training mailboxes. On my Mac (running Tahoe), the folders are empty once the emails have been appropriately moved by SpamSieve. Easy enough to delete the duplicated emails from the Training mailboxes, but is there any reason why copies remain in these training folders in iOS 26 after SpamSieve has relocated them, but not so in macOS 26? Thanks!
iCloud webmail shows the same as macOS: both training folders are empty (correct). My iPhone still shows TrainSpam with the junk email that was already moved to my Spam folder (and it is there as well in my iPhone’s spam folder).
To summarize:
Mac/iCloud Webmail/iPad (iPadOS 26):
TrainSpam and TrainGood work as directed
iPhone:
TrainSpam and TrainGood both retain a copy of messages that have already been correctly filtered by SpamSieve
It’s weird that my iPad and Mac are both quite correct but not the phone. All on the same WiFi network.
Thanks, I had honestly put off setting up the old drone support for Apple Mail. The single checkbox setup is a big improvement. My only suggestion would be to show some type of progress indicator when setting this up, as I did not see the mailboxes appear for a while and didn’t know if it was working correctly.
In beta 6 it will start as soon as you click the checkbox (instead of waiting until the next interval) and show a progress spinner while it’s processing.
