Have been using it for years with no problems. Yesterday I had to do a reinstall of my complete system. For some reason the extension wouldn’t load onto Apple Mail.
Got into a real mess following instructions so decided to delete SpamSieve and reload from backup. When I try to delete I get ‘The operation can’t be completed because the item “MacOS” is in use.’
If a file is in use, you can restart your Mac and try again. However, I’ve never seen deleting the SpamSieve app to help with a Mail plug-in problem.
Due to macOS’s protected folders, plug-in loading problems are usually not fixed by reinstalling and restoring from backup. In fact, that can create problems where there are none because of the way macOS’s migration/restore works. So I generally recommend manually removing the old plug-in and then installing it again. If you need further assistance, please send in a diagnostic report.
If it’s in the trash, it’s not affecting Mail or macOS, so deleting it won’t change anything (except save a little disk space). You should be able to empty the trash after restarting the Mac.
SpamSieve shows the Welcome window and help if you have not trained it with at least one good message and one spam message. Did you follow the instructions to do an initial training? It’s expected that it would start out empty again if you deleted everything as described in your original post.
I don’t know why Finder would report the file in use after restarting—and MacOS is not even a file, it’s a folder. You could try entering this command in Terminal:
I have, after a couple of tries successfully re-installed SpamSieve and it is working but having tried all of the methods you suggested, I am unable to get these files to empty from the trash. Can you figure this out?
If looks like you have an ACL permissions override set on your trash that prevents files from being deleted. It doesn’t seem to be specific to the SpamSieve files. You should be able to remove the ACL using this Terminal command: