My email host has changed. It’s now GoDaddy. It used to be a small, independent ISP.
After the change, a lot of “good” email got classified as spam. I’m not sure what is going on. I suspect GoDaddy has its own spam filter. I don’t know if GoDaddy’s spam filter is trainable. If it is, I guess I have to get my email by logging in to the GoDaddy email web portal, which is a lot of trouble. The GoDaddy spam filter might conflict with SpamSieve, or it might conflict with SpamSieve’s previous training.
I wasn’t sure what to do. I decided to re-train SpamSieve, so I deleted my old corpus. I don’t know if this is going to work, though, if GoDaddy’s server is incorrectly classifying good email as spam.
Due to the timing of the problem, it’s highly likely that GoDaddy’s spam filter is what’s moving your good messages to Junk. You can tell for sure by looking at how the messages are colored or at SpamSieve’s log.
Retraining SpamSieve will not help if GoDaddy’s filter is the problem. GoDaddy’s filter can only partially be turned off, so I recommend setting up SpamSieve to rescue the good messages.
The messages recently marked as junk would normally be recognized as “good” by SpamSieve, which I have used and trained for a long time. These messages have brown or gold text on a white background. That seems to indicate they were flagged as junk by GoDaddy’s server.
I need to understand how this works. I’m guessing here. Is this correct?
1-GoDaddy’s server adds its own junk marker to the header, then sends it to me.
2-My email client sends the message marked as junk directly to my email client’s junk mail box. (Apple mail, in my case.)
3-By training these messages as “good” with SpamSieve, I am teaching SpamSieve to disregard the “junk” marker put in the header by GoDaddy and to move the message out of the junk box.
Is this right? If so, I understand what I am doing. If not, I don’t.
No, that’s not what’s happening. As it stands now:
GoDaddy’s server marks the message as junk (which causes the brown/gold text in Mail).
GoDaddy’s server moves the message to Junk.
Because the message is not in the Inbox when your Mac first sees it, Mail does not apply the rules to it. So SpamSieve never looks at the message.
The rescue setup that I recommended adds a special rule that causes SpamSieve to look for new messages that arrive in the Junk mailbox and move them back to the inbox if it thinks they’re good.
I have experienced similar problems with the host of my domain (not GoDaddy). Fortunately, there were never too many mis-classified messages for the issue to be a big deal. I was able to minimize their number by choosing the lowest level of spam filtering on the domain’s cPanel.
I’ve tried to adjust the level of spam filtering, but the user interface was unfamiliar and I wasn’t sure how to proceed. Can you post a few instructions for doing this? With a few screen shots, if possible. Thanks!
Sorry to say, the Microsoft Exchange control panel at GoDaddy does not resemble this user interface. There may be underlying similarities. If so, I am too dense to discern them.
