Ever since I upgraded to SpamSieve 3 using the new extension-based filtering, Mail “recovers” a few messages each day. These are always spam messages and ones that have been processed by SpamSieve (i.e. I can find copies of them in the spam folder that have already been processed).
I’ve tried rebuilding the mailboxes. I’ve also gone through the steps to do a “full” rebuild. Neither of those has resulted in any different behavior. I will note that this only seems to happen to one of my email accounts – an imap server run by the folks over at zoho.com. My iCloud email does not seem to have this problem.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to fix this? The problem doesn’t stop me from doing anything, but it is annoying.
I don’t know what causes this, but I’ve seen it happen occasionally for all sorts of messages (both spam and good, with both SpamSieve and regular Mail rules, and with both SpamSieve 2 and SpamSieve 3) whenever Mail is moving messages from one place to another (even via drag and drop).
Thanks for the reply, Michael. I’ve already tried a full rebuild of Mail’s db and just verified that I do indeed store the junk mailbox on the server in each account. I didn’t have this problem with the previous version of SpamSieve, so thought this might be specific to the new version, or perhaps just the extension-based version. I’ve not tried switching to the plugin version to see if that affects it in any way, but I get the impression that either no longer works in the latest Mail anyway, or soon won’t.
Anyway, certainly not enough of an annoyance to prevent me from using SpamSieve.
The plug-in version works with macOS 13 and earlier.
It would be interesting looking at SpamSieve’s Log window what you see for the Origin of each predicted spam message. Does it mostly say SpamSieve extension or filter inboxes or filter other mailboxes? Is there a pattern as far as which origins are the ones that you see recovered?
Yes, it doesn’t point to a solution, but it does confirm that you’re running into a Mail bug where it’s not sending new messages to the Mail extension. SpamSieve is working around this, and the problem seems to be triggered by SpamSieve using AppleScript to tell Mail to move the message to Junk.
Usually, I find that using a server Junk mailbox is more reliable, but you could try going to Mailbox Behaviors and choosing a Junk Mailbox under On My Mac and see whether that makes a difference.
After switching the junk mailbox for the one IMAP account to be on my local machine, I no longer see the recovered messages issue (previously I’d get a dozen or two a day).
Unfortunately, I’m now getting a sporadic case of the spinning multi-colored beachball. I’ve not had that happen until I made this change, and now I see it maybe once or twice a day, usually when I’m trying to delete a message from my inbox. It eventually recovers – just takes it a few minutes to actually delete for some unknown reason. May not even be related to SpamSieve, but seems suspicious since it did only start happening when I made that change.
Thanks for the offer, Michael. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), the spinning ball of doom stopped happening shortly after I posted that. As far as I can tell nothing has changed. I can only assume that something else was going on. Should it start happening again, I’ll try to capture a sample log and post it here.