SpamSieve seems to pause server-side SpamAssasin

[john_p]

Brand new to SpamSieve, which is doing exactly what it should. However…

My SpamSieve folder is a local folder on my Mac (This all within Apple Mail). My ISP (HostPapa) runs SpamAssasin and the only control I have is to turn it on or off and set a threshold level (now set at 3, which is quite severe). When SpamSieve is NOT running, SpamAssasin catches some spam, but not nearly enough. The SpamAssasin hits get put in the Junk folder on the server (I can see them). When I turn-on SpamSieve, there appears to be no more spam caught by the server-side SpamAssasin, i.e. the server-side Junk folder gets no more spam emails. I was expecting that the server-side SpamAssasin would keep going, and SpamSieve would pick-up where it left off…

Does this make any sense? It is as though SpamSieve on my Mac is taking priority but I can’t understand how it is doing that. Is there any control within SpamSieve I have missed, that configures how this works? I would like the server-side SpamAssasin to keep doing its thing, in the hope it gets better and at least mitigates spam on my phones and tablets.

Thanks for any thoughts or comments…

[Michael_Tsai]

When I turn-on SpamSieve, there appears to be no more spam caught by the server-side SpamAssasin, i.e. the server-side Junk folder gets no more spam emails. I was expecting that the server-side SpamAssasin would keep going, and SpamSieve would pick-up where it left off…

Yes, the way it normally works is that whatever SpamAssassin doesn’t catch gets left in your inbox, and those are the messages that get processed through SpamSieve.

Does this make any sense? It is as though SpamSieve on my Mac is taking priority but I can’t understand how it is doing that. Is there any control within SpamSieve I have missed, that configures how this works?

Yeah, that makes no sense to me because SpamAssassin should be doing its work before your Mac and SpamSieve even see the messages. There’s no control for this in SpamSieve—I don’t think it’s even possible for the Mac to make the server filter do its job, or to have the Mac intercept the messages first.

Is it possible that SpamAssassin just happened to miss a bunch of messages in a row? If you show the raw source of the messages, you should be able to see whether there are X-Spam headers showing that the server filter processed the message.

[john_p]

Thank you Michael. With that confirmation of what is going on, I will look elsewhere and double-check