An easier way would be to just select Disable spam filtering in Apple Mail in SpamSieve’s settings:
Then you wouldn’t lose your training data or have to reconfigure anything to get it back. With automatic filtering disabled, you can still click the Filter Now button:
to manually initiate filtering, and if you do this when Mail is not bogged down it would be unlikely to cause a hang.
I don’t think you need to remove any background apps. But if you do want to test for conflicts, I would try doing a safe boot and see whether that helps.
I can recover my training data from this week’s Carbon Copy Clone along with the configuration. Besides, a fresh start isn’t always the worst thing. But, at least this way I’ll know for certain whether it’s a problem with Mail or whether my previous SpamSieve installation is the cause. I’ll give it a week or two then try with SpamSieve again.
I have never seen a case where resetting SpamSieve fixed a hang in Mail, and I can’t think of any mechanism that could cause that. Mail is either stuck waiting on the server or its own internal stuff, not SpamSieve. It think it’s more likely that deleting all of Mail’s files would help, though I have so far not seen a case where that was necessary, either.
But, it’s hard to imagine that I am the only person using two email accounts, one being a Yahoo related account and the other being iCloud, who uses macOS Mail.
So, I’ll watch to see what happens over the next couple weeks and go from there. If the problem persists, it’s due to something within Mail. Who knows what.
That was my thinking behind reinstalling Sonoma a couple weeks back. To be fair, it wasn’t a clean install in that I used the Time Machine backup to restore what had been there before. So, some messed us preference file or similar could well have migrated forward. But, I did run Onyx to clean up various caches and the like. EtreCheck Pro says that everything is grand and glorious.
It’s strange overall. This is a 16 month old Mac Studio. It doesn’t have exotic processes running in the background, as shown earlier. Up until a couple months ago, everything ran great. Until one day…
When the hang happens, reopening Mail just brings on another hang. A Safe boot often helps, but I can’t be sure if that’s because of the Safe boot cleaning processes or because after a few restarts, Mail behaves again.
