I have SpamSieve installed on two different computers: same rules, same everything but my spam only seems to get filtered when computer A is on. If I only have computer B on, spam filtering doesn’t work. Any idea why?
Both Macs (iMac and MacBook Air), same OS.
Which version of macOS are you using? Which mail client? Which multi-Mac setup?
Without knowing anything else, it sounds like there’s a setup problem on computer B. Please see this page.
I think I figured it out. I have script apple-mail-discard-spam running in the background as an application. It wasn’t setup as a login item on computer B so it wouldn’t automatically load and run when I restarted my computer.
Are you referring to a different script? The Apple Mail - Discard Spam script has nothing to do with filtering and should not be run as an application.
I don’t remember the history of how this all came together, but the way I have things set up does 90% of what I want it to do. You helped me along the way. Within Apple Mail I’m running (in order)…
SpamSieve [Score]
SpamSieve [Blue][Gray]
SpamSieve [Spam]
I’m running a separate script, apple-mail-discard-spam, as an application that’s always running in the background.
The end result is that SpamSieve filters all the spam that comes through and puts it into my ‘Spam’ folder. These emails are mostly gray and some are purple. I think blue ones come in there as well but I don’t remember and just going by what I’m seeing right now. Every now and then emails will show up in ‘SpamSieve’ but not very often and I think they come in as orange, red, and maybe yellow but again my memory is fuzzy. I check this more carefully because mostly it’s spam but every now and then there are good emails in there.
Because the emails are color coded in the Spam folder, I can do a very quick scan, 99% of the time select all, and delete. And then I go into my Trash folder every now and then, sort by flag which puts all the spam at the bottom, select that big huge chunk, and banish for good.
So that’s why I say 90% because I still have to do some manual work to banish the spam forever. Ideally the worst spam would just banish itself but I think we went through this before and it’s either not possible through Apple Mail or it didn’t work. But I’m happy enough with this solution.
What is it that you think the script is doing for you? The intent of the script is to completely delete the messages in the Spam mailbox. It only does this once—when you run the script—so it doesn’t make sense to me that you would want to keep this running as an application. And, secondly, you described how you are manually double-deleting the messages from Spam and Trash, so it doesn’t sound like you are really using the script to do that.
What this system is doing for me is successfully filtering out tons of the worst spam (gray, blue, purple) and putting it in one place where I can scan at a glance and dump into the trash. And yes, every few weeks I go into the trash to banish forever.
Is it ideal? No. But you’ve helped me quite a bit get to this point.
If you can advise me how to have that worst spam go immediately to the trash and delete itself, thus removing those two steps, I’m all ears. I’m willing to gamble that 100% of the gray, blue, purple emails are spam and I don’t need to look at them first.
That’s good. My point is that the script is not doing any of the above. So I don’t think you need to run it as an application. Secondly, since the script isn’t what’s filtering your mail, I don’t think it setting it up as a login item is what solved the original problem that you reported on computer B.
There are two options:
All I know is that the only change I made to computer B was to make that script app a login item and now it works. That’s literally the only change I made.
Everything on computer A and B is identical with respect to OS and what I’m doing with SpamSieve. I checked every rule and even every line of code between the two apple-mail-discard-spam scripts.
I’ll try your other suggestions and report back.
My guess is that the difference was logging out and logging in again.