SpamSieve disable mailboxes in Mac Mail. Need fix ASAP

I have multiple mailboxes in mac Mail connected to diverse mail servers. After I installed SpamSieve, three critical mailboxes were disabled, so I cannot send or receive mail using the mail servers associated with those mailboxes. (I get a triangle with the exclamation point symbol, plus the message: “An SSL error has occurred and a secure connection to the server cannot be made.” All of my authentication protocols worked fine before I installed SpamSieve, and they should still be working, seems to me. Further. the other five mailboxes in Mac Mail are still live and functional.

Please advise how to reactivate my access to all of my mail servers under SpamSieve.

SpamSieve is supposed to be the very best spam filter available for Mac Mail (running Mountain Lion). If I cannot get this server access issue resolved swiftly, sad to say, I will have to uninstall the app and try some other app instead.

Please help in a timely way.

Thanks.

SpamSieve does not affect SSL connections or the way Mail communicates with the mail server. I think it’s just a coincidence that something else changed on your Mac or network around the time when you installed SpamSieve. However, if you want to be sure, you can uninstall SpamSieve’s Apple Mail components as described here.

test results
The possibility of a coincidence seems small when all eight of my mailboxes were working fine before I installed SpamSieve and moments later three mailboxes were disabled. The only thing I did on my end was install SpamSieve.

As a test, I disabled the Spam Sieve Rule in Apple Mail, rebooted the Apple Mail app, and the three servers are still not working.

I did a further test. I tried sending mail from and to each address affected by the three servers, and discovered that I can send mail through the servers but cannot receive mail.

Please note that each mail server has a different username and password. For each emial address, the username and password for the outgoing (SMTP) server tied to each separate address is the same as the username and password for the outgoing mail server tied to that distinct address. In theory, the authentication for outgoing mail should work equally well for incoming mail, but that is not the case.

Since SpamSieve is designed to deal with incoming mail, given the timing, I still have to wonder if the app is involved in this sudden incoming server authentication failures.

The mystery is why only three of eight mail serves is being disabled. Of these, two of the disabled servers are related to two websites hosted by one company on two separate servers, and the third mail server is related to a private mail hosting company. Does this offer any clues?

Thanks for sharing your wisdom.

I actually see SSL problems fairly regularly, affecting all apps, not just Mail. It seems to be related to logging into certain Wi-Fi networks. The Mac decides that the certificates it has are invalid, and so certain secure connections are blocked (unless I tell it to trust a new certificate, which is potentially dangerous when on a foreign network). Rebooting the Mac seems to straighten things out.

Like I said, I don’t think SpamSieve is related to this problem, but to test that you would need to uninstall the plug-in, not just disable the rule.

If, as you say, you are using SMTP (not SMTPS) then it’s not a secure connection, so there is no SSL, so it makes sense that sending would not be affected.

I can see why you would think that, but SpamSieve doesn’t change any server or network settings. In fact, it doesn’t even communicate with the mail server. The flow is: Mail downloads messages from the server, Mail asks SpamSieve whether or not they’re spam, Mail applies the rule actions (e.g. to move the message to the Spam mailbox).

Further testing
Michael

I uninstalled the SpamSieve app, and three mailboxes were still offline. Two of them overnight came back online, which says to me the issue was with webhost’s mail servers, not the SpamSieve app. The third mailbox is still showing an SSL error, but since you say your app does not affect the server connection, I am now looking to the mail provider for this solution.

Meanwhile, I have reinstalled SpamSieve. I notice that the attachments of email filtered into the spam folder on my Mac are still being downloaded, which to me seems a vulnerability if these attachments are infected with a virus. Is there a way within SpamSiever to prevent the downloading to my Mac of any attachments in mail identified as spam?

The trick is that I still want to see what emails (sans attachments) has been filtered into the Spam folder on my Mac, so I can train the app on what to accept and reject.

Thanks again for your wise help.

No, because Mail has already downloaded the message by the time SpamSieve sees it. However, this isn’t a vulnerability because the attachments are stored encoded within the raw source of the e-mail. They are not extracted out to your hard drive. (And, if they were, you would still have to double-click them to do any damage.)

Understood
Thanks for the clarification.

So, I will use Spam Sieve for the next few weeks during the trial period, and if all goes well, there will be no more posts here, and then I will be a happy purchaser, I hope.

Happy New Year!