having intermittent problems with attachments not coming down from imap server correctly when spam sieve is in use.
any suggestions? Seeing a list of strange text characters instead of the pdf file. only a problem on mac using spam sieve.
I doubt this is caused by SpamSieve because it has no involvement with either the download or display of messages. However, you could try troubleshooting this by temporarily disabling SpamSieve and seeing whether that helps. For example, in Apple Mail you could do this by unchecking the SpamSieve rule in Mail’s Preferences. Which mail client and version of macOS are you using?
yes i have already shown it is spam sieve. What I did was uninstall spam sieve and there is no problem with attachments. I sent 5 emails in a row. Then I installed spam sieve back and problem is occurring. Also I have a lap top that does not have spam sieve installed and that machine never had the problem.
using osMac Sierra 10.12
using mac mail client 10.0 (3226)
spam sieve says it is up to date so must be using it.
Problem never occurred with verio POP account … only occurred when i went to a godaddy imap service last week.
Virtually all my attachments were glitching with our internal guys with macs using spam sieve … we have no issues now that spam seive is uninstalled from all the mail clients.
I am trying to narrow down exactly what is happening because it is not very scientific to compare the behavior of different messages on different Macs with different software configurations.
Do you mean that you sent 5 test messages to yourself? Have you ever sent yourself any test messages that did not display properly?
When you say “no problem” do you mean that the exact same messages that were displaying improperly before are now fixed? Or do you mean that newly received messages display properly?
Does the problem occur if SpamSieve is installed but the SpamSieve rule is unchecked?
Please also see my reply to your e-mail where I asked for some additional information.
Yes i sent the messages to myself and two other members in the group. With spam sieve installed they had this glitch that looked like this
At godaddy webmail there was never any issues. At my windows outlook account never issues. On all of our iphones never any issues. On a MacBook laptop without spam sieve never any issues. For all three iMacs with spam sieve installed the glitch occurs.
Once the problem occurred it never fixed. It stayed glitchy. When spam-sieve is removed from all three iMacs, there was never a glitch all works as it should. The pdf attachment worked as it should.
When i saw the laptop had no spam-sieve and the 3 clients had it I uninstalled spam-sieve from all machines, I did not try to uncheck the rule first because I did not think of it. Can the rule mess with the header information after mail downloaded it?
With the .eml file that you sent me, it looks like Mail did not download the entire message from the server. You can get Mail to redownload it by deleting the cache file for that message or (if you don’t know how to find that) by rebuilding the database (which will cause it to redownload everything).
Does the message then display correctly? My guess is that it will, even if SpamSieve is still installed and the rule is active. Mail should see this as an old message and not re-apply the rule.
I didn’t see anything wrong with the message’s headers. In any case, SpamSieve does not (and, by design, cannot) modify any of the message’s header information or body data. It’s possible that the fact that the rule is looking at the message content is causing Mail to go through a different code path as it fetches or stores the message data, and somehow it’s saving the data before it gets the complete message from the server. However, in 14 years I’ve never seen anything like this happen.
I will investigate this some more with a test GoDaddy IMAP account after the Thanksgiving holiday. Meanwhile, it may help to update to macOS 10.12.1 and to look for errors from Mail in the Console when a problem message is received.
Thanks for your efforts
Another thing you could try in the meantime is unchecking your SpamSieve rule and instead using a rule that uses the Apple Mail - Move If Spam script. This will use a different code path in Mail.
I was able to reproduce this problem on macOS 10.12.1 using a GoDaddy IMAP account with the SpamSieve rule enabled. I was also able to reproduce it without SpamSieve installed:
- With a rule that runs an AppleScript that reads the message’s source (but doesn’t make any changes).
- With a rule that has a “Message content contains” condition (no AppleScript).
- When Mail is recaching a message that was previously received.
Therefore, it looks like there is a underlying bug in Mail, which SpamSieve is triggering. I can reproduce this pretty consistently (but not 100% of the time) with a “GoDaddy Workspace Email” server, which is their homegrown IMAP product. This is their IMAP-only server, not the Microsoft Exchange–based one, which also supports IMAP. I have not seen this problem with any other mail provider.
I will report the bug to Apple. Since it’s so easily reproduced without any third-party software or scripts, hopefully it will be easy for them to find and fix.
Meanwhile, you may be able to work around the bug:
- Instead of filtering out the spam automatically with a SpamSieve rule, bulk-select all the new messages in the inbox and run the Apple Mail - Move If Spam script to have it move the spam ones to the Spam mailbox.
- Or switch from GoDaddy Workspace Email to GoDaddy’s Exchange server. According to the representative I contacted, this is actually half the price.
Apple closed the bug I filed, and the problem does not seem to occur for me with macOS 10.12.2. It looks to me like they fixed it.