When should SpamSieve be Retrained?

[chrisryan]

I upgraded to 3.x and, after realizing that somehow SpamSieve had not been properly activated, I’ve been using it for a few weeks. However, turning it back on it hasn’t made any difference at all. And I’m not sure 2.x had been much better for quite a while.

I am a long-term user; I can’t even remember a time when I didn’t use SpamSieve with Apple Mail.

I am only getting false positives. I dutifully train them, but it seems to make no difference. The senders are all in my Contacts, but no matter how many times I select Train as Good SpamSieve still thinks they’re spam.

I’ve looked through a few threads here but haven’t found anything useful yet.

Might it be time to start over? It looks like 2014 was the last time I reset.

Filtered Mail
42,892 Good Messages
11,900 Spam Messages (22%)
3 Spam Messages Per Day

SpamSieve Accuracy
292 False Positives
238 False Negatives (45%)
99.0% Correct

Corpus
5,657 Good Messages
6,467 Spam Messages (53%)
1,107,310 Total Words

Rules
32,599 Allowlist Rules
9,600 Blocklist Rules

Showing Statistics Since
2014-02-10, 5:00 PM

[Michael_Tsai]

@chrisryan

I am only getting false positives. I dutifully train them, but it seems to make no difference. The senders are all in my Contacts, but no matter how many times I select Train as Good SpamSieve still thinks they’re spam.

That’s not a training problem then. 99% of the time when people say this, it’s actually a server junk filter, not SpamSieve, that thought the messages were spam. This is easy to see from the background color of the messages or from SpamSieve’s Log window.

It’s also possible, but unlikely, that you have Use macOS Contacts unchecked or that SpamSieve does not have access to read your Contacts.

@chrisryan

I’ve looked through a few threads here but haven’t found anything useful yet.

There’s a FAQ.

@chrisryan

Might it be time to start over?

This should only be done after checking in the Log window that SpamSieve really did make lots of mistakes.