SpamSieve and Outlook for Mac 2019: very slow scan

Hello,

I have to wait 10 minutes to get 30 messages filtered from InboxSpamSieve. Is there any way to speed up?

Normally it checks every 60 seconds, so on average a message would only be in InboxSpamSieve for 30 seconds before filtering. Do you have it set to a different check interval?


Also, you can see whether it’s currently filtering because the Filter Now button will change to say Filtering…. Is the problem that it’s not filtering as often as you think it should or that it is filtering but it’s taking a long time?

You can also see in the Log window what’s happening and whether there’s perhaps a certain message that bogged things down with a large processing time.

Hello Michael,

Thank you for the prompt response. The problem is that I see this button saying “Filtering…” and I see messages in InboxSpamSieve and nothing happening. For example, there are 30 messages in this folder, it starts filtering and process about 10 messages than stops and nothing happens. After some time it could process one message and stop again…

Anyway, I checked the Log window and found many error messages saying “Error filtering InboxSpamSieve message (RE: xxxx.com- DWYEROMEGA//Offer 6768YTYBZZZ): Outlook could not get the source of message: RE: xxxx.com- DWYEROMEGA//Offer 6768YTYBZZZ”

Do you know how to solve this?

Regards, Dmitry

This error means that Outlook had not completely loaded the message, so the data wasn’t available to SpamSieve. SpamSieve kept retrying and 30 seconds but then gave up and moved on to the next message. So this could explain the 10-minute delay that you saw if there were multiple messages that wouldn’t load.

If you’re using an IMAP account, I recommend that you choose Tools ‣ Accounts…. Select your account and click the Advanced… button. Make sure that Download headers only is unchecked. Hopefully that will get Outlook to fully load the messages before SpamSieve tries to access them.

I’m using Exchange account and this checkbox is unchecked. For some reason Outlook loads full message only when I open it.

Looks like I solved this problem. Changed in Outlook Settings → Reading → Security → Automatically download pictures from the Internet to “In all messages”. It’d been “Never” before.

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That’s interesting. I would have expected that setting to only affect remote images, not the message data that SpamSieve needs to access.