Spamsieve log shows email has been identified as spam but caught email is not in spam folder or in any folder

Hi

I use latest Catalina on a mac, IMAP account and using Mac default mail application.

I am finding that replies to emails I have sent are being incorrectly identifed as spam. I sometimes see them arrive, and then they disappear and I cannot find them anywhere. I can see that the email has been caught and identified as spam in the spamseive log, but the emails are not moved to the spam folder they disappear.

Am in incorrect in thinking that if I send an email to a new domain, that domain is automatically added to the white list? If not I can add it myself I suppose using a new rule, right?

Meanwhile all other spam is being correctly caught, and put in to the spam folder - hundreds per day.

I would like to find out where these missing “caught” emails I can see in the log are if they are not being moved to “spam”. Does the log detail what happend to a caught email identified as spam?

Thanks in advance.

It’s not normal for that to happen. If you send in a diagnostic report I can look into what’s causing that.

You can check the SpamSieve rule in Mail’s preferences to confirm where Mail is set to move the messages. SpamSieve itself only identifies whether the message is spam or not. Mail is what moves it. If the messages are not showing up in the specified mailbox, it’s possible that Mail’s data store is damaged (a complete rebuild might help) or you’re running into the Catalina bug where Mail deletes messages instead of moving them (choosing a different location, i.e. On My Mac vs. on the server, might help). I recommend enabling SpamSieve’s backup feature until this is resolved.

SpamSieve does not whitelist domain automatically. It does auto-whitelist addresses that send you good messages. You can also edit the rule to whitelist previous recipients.

Yes, you can do that, too.

thank you for your prompt attention with this. I have followed all of your advice (apart from the hard mailbox rebuild). I have also created a diagnostic report and send it directly to you via email. Please can you reply to this post if you get the opportunity to so just in case the email gets zapped? :slight_smile:

thank you.

Hello Michael

Thank you for your prompt attention on this and the excellent list of helpful links and explanations. I understand the Catalina mail issue is not related to Spamseive but to AppleScript.

I have done all suggestions apart from the hard rebuild of the mailboxes.

Please find attached a copy of the diagnostic report. If it helps the domain of one of the emails which was zapped was capita.com on today’s date (25th).

If I need to send the diagnostic report elsewhere please let me know.

Thanks for the report. I suggest dragging the Spam-catching strategy in the preferences back to the middle position. Right now it is set to be super-aggressive.

The other issue is that there is a long history of messages from capita.com that SpamSieve classified and spam and you did not train as good. So SpamSieve learned that they are spam. It’s important to correct all the mistakes. Since this was not done, I recommend that you choose Reset Corpus from the Filter menu, then re-train SpamSieve to clear out the incorrect training data.

Hi Michael

thank you once again. I shall try all of your recommendations.

kind regards

Ed Dickins