SpamSieve and non-Inbox mail folders

Just need to confirm that there’s no way, apart from user interaction, that SpamSieve could possibly move emails filed away in local (On My Mac) folders to the Spam folder AND train itself that they are Spam.

Pretty sure what happened was user error by my client but have to ask since they are breathing down my neck.

That’s correct. SpamSieve does not go looking through your old mailboxes. However, if the user edits a Mail rule, Mail will ask if it should apply all the rules to all the messages in the current mailbox. If the user clicks Apply, that will filter those messages through SpamSieve, and if it thinks they’re spam that could result in them being auto-trained as spam. So it’s best to always click Don’t Apply when editing rules.

Thanks, that is one of my theories of what they had done. The other mistake they made (before contacting me) was simply dragging all that good mail out of the spam folder back into their INBOX without training it as good (again). 10k emails, huge mess.

For 10k e-mails, it actually might be better to reset all the training data or restore it from backup.

To do that, is it ONLY “Filter > Reset Corpus…” or is there more to get them to start their SpamSieve over?

To reset the rules and the corpus, please see Resetting SpamSieve.