Thanks for your reply. Since I’ve already installed the beta, I can’t remember exactly what was shown to me during the installation. I’ve used SpamSieve for many years (Thanks!) and though many, many updates. During today’s installation process, I didn’t see anything that indicated that there were new steps to be taken, this time. I saw the message stating that the installation was completed, and I moved on from there. If there were new instructions that I overlooked, I apologize. But I recall seeing anything that looked different from past updates. So, I was unaware of the new steps.
This is far, far from my first time installing the plug-in. So, I was fully aware of that part of the process.
My guess is that you thought it was the same alert that you’re used to seeing and so clicked OK without fully reading it. That’s totally understandable. I expect other people to do the same thing, so perhaps there needs to be some other mechanism to remind you to enable the plug-in.
I think I’ve done everything correctly, but every time i restart Mail the plugin is disable.
I re-enable it, it restart and it’s oof.
How do I troubleshot it?
It turns out that the problem was that my home folder was NOT in the startup drive. I made a symlink to it in the User folder on theSymbolicLinker and everything now works!
Broken again under public beta 2
SpamSieve is definately broken under the Mojave public beta 2. The Apple Mail plug in no longer functions, but no error is given.
Are there logs that we can send in that would be helpful to the developers?
You are currently the only customer I’m aware of who has not been able to get it to work on Mojave. Please make sure that you’ve enabled the plug-in, as described here.
Plug-in stops working
I found part of the problem. The SpamSieve plug-in will stop loading in Apple Mail at random. I have to go back into “Manage Plug-ins” in Apple Mail preferences, and check the box again. Not sure why it does this.
SpamSieve 2.9.32b4 is available now. This version makes the installation and update flow much clearer on macOS 10.14 and fixes all known issues with Mojave (except for the obscure feature to override the hard-to-read gold text on junk messages, which it may not be possible to bring back).
You should download the regular, non-beta version. Then click this link. That will make SpamSieve’s Software Update command download the beta version (and notify you of new betas).
Since Sat I was operating under the mistaken assumption that my email had stopped working. Basically all communication dropped. I opened a ticket with my mail provider (FastMail), and ended up moving my DNS management from FastMail back to my hosting company over a several day effort to fix the issue. FastMail was also helping. After 5 days or so, we realized that SpamSieve was deleting all the messages as they came in and moving them to the Spam folder on my local machine. I was also running the Mac OS 10.14 public beta, but we were close to golden master at this point, so I didn’t think that was the issue.
It was not easy to figure out what was happening for the following reasons:
I mostly check emails on my phone
I rarely think about SpamSieve, and certainly not as a potential email deleter. (that’s a good thing)
I didn’t receive any communication and had no awareness of how 10.14 or SpamSieve might affect my mail.
After the fact, I found out that
in 10.14, SpamSieve requires special permission from the OS to run with Mail
If it doesn’t have the permission it moves ALL mail to the Spam folder (!!!)
Hopefully this will be a different experience with the release of 10.14 and whatever release of SpamSieve is supposed to go with it, but if not, I think you need to STRONGLY consider changing the experience to avoid problems.
The dialog box is very understated considering the problems that are caused by SpamSieve not getting the permissions from the OS. IMO it should certainly say that your email will all move to the spam folder appear to be deleted if the permissions are not updated. You might also consider sending an email with a big “ATTN” flag or similar in the subject.
I’m a pretty tech-y person - ex-programmer, ex-UI designer, in software product management for a long time. If it took me days to figure this out, it will be worse for other people.
Thanks for the feedback. I certainly want to make the Mojave update as smooth as possible for people.
To be clear, SpamSieve was not running and so it wasn’t doing anything. It was your Mail rule that was moving the messages. When SpamSieve is installed, it restricts the action of the rule so that it only applies to spam messages.
I’m still trying to find a workaround to prevent this, but the current design is so far the least bad way that I’ve found to handle the unfortunate changes to Mail in macOS 10.14. So far, I have tried to communicate this issue in an e-mail to SpamSieve customers, on the blog, and at the top of the technical support page. It’s also mentioned at the top of the notes when doing an automatic software update. I will send out another e-mail right before Mojave is released, but unfortunately some customers have said they don’t want to receive e-mails.
I’m curious about exactly what happened here. Are you saying that you did see the dialog but decided not to do what it said because it didn’t seem that important?
Do you think it would be useful to have SpamSieve disable (uncheck) the rule in Mail if it detects that it doesn’t have access? Or would that just further confuse things? (Unfortunately, SpamSieve can’t tell whether its plug-in is installed if it doesn’t have Full Disk Access. And it can’t disable the Mail rule unless you give it Automation access to control Mail.)
Thanks very much for the quick response. That is exactly what happened - I was in the middle of working and SpamSieve installed and popped up some dialog and I skimmed it for 2 seconds and dismissed it, thinking I would deal with it later, because it was unclear that taking no action would effectively break all my email, and do so in a way that was hard to figure out later (keep in mind I get my email on multiple devices, and only have SpamSieve operating on desktop).
I would avoid the disruptive outcome at all costs. Meaning if you have full control of the dialog, perhaps it should say something like “OS X 10.14 data protection settings have disabled SpamSieve. Spam Sieve has been turned off to ensure all email is not moved to the spam folder. Please visit spamsieve.com for instructions on how to install and reactivate the program when you have a moment.”
Or maybe you come up with something better. But it’s way too easy as-is for SpamSieve to start effectively deleting emails. (fortunately not actually deleting them, but if you’re email is down for 5 days, any time-sensitive emails may have well been deleted.)
Clearly you are a conscientious developer, and the program works well. I’m just trying to be helpful and prevent anyone else the same thing I went through, so excuse me if the email comes across as negative in any way, since I don’t mean that. It’s hard to always have written text come through with the right tone. Hope the message is helpful and helps to proactively squelch some problems.
I really appreciate your bringing this up. I had thought the dialog was sufficient because seemingly none of the many beta testers ran into this problem. But clearly you are right that some number of people will not obey the dialog promptly and then will be very confused. I am investigating the possibility of SpamSieve automatically disabling its own Mail rules when the plug-in is not able to load. For a variety of reasons, I don’t think this will work 100% of the time, but it could help in the vast majority of cases. And it will cause some amount of friction, but that is better than having messages not be where you expect them to be.
The new beta (2.9.33b1) rewords the Full Disk Access dialog and will disable the SpamSieve rules in Mail if SpamSieve’s plug-in can’t be installed or isn’t enabled.
The new beta (2.9.34b1) should improve a lot of cases where SpamSieve could not verify that the Mail plug-in was enabled and so it would deactivate the rules just to be sure.
Just wanted to let you know that all was well on this end with Mojave until 2.9.34b3. No filtering. I’ve rebooted. I’ve quit and reinstalled the plug-in’s and they are activated in Mail’s preference’s. I’ve toggle them on and off again. But for some reason, with this newer build, the spam isn’t filtering. If I can provide any additional data to help you, let me know. I’ve been testing the beta’s for some time, you’ve probably never heard from me because they all ran perfectly for me. Until 2.9.34b3.
Thanks for creating such a fantastic product and for your support.
