Resetting SpamSieve without losing corpus

I’ve got SpamSieve set up as a spam-catching drone, but somehow the drone got misconfigured. It used to place spam into the IMAP folder “INBOX/Spam”, but now it is putting it into “INBOX/INBOX/Spam”. (I think the problem started when I began mucking around with Mail’s Mailbox > Use This Mailbox For commands on the non-drone.) This has led to various other problems, such as preventing the AddToSpam and AddToGood scripts from working.

All of Mail’s settings seem correct, and going through the “Spam Sieve - Change Settings” didn’t help. I’ve decided I need to reinstall SpamSieve. I probably need to delete and recreate my IMAP account in Mail as well.

The only problem is my corpus. How can I do all this reinstalling without losing my corpus? (I’ve spent months training it and don’t want to lose it.) Is it as simple as saving a copy of the corpus, reinstalling SpamSieve, and then copying the corpus back to its original location? If so, which files do I need to preserve?

Are you referring to incoming or trained spam messages?

It sounds like maybe you did something with the IMAP path prefix.

What isn’t working?

“SpamSieve - Change Settings” does not control any settings that the drone setup uses.

It sounds like the problems are entirely in Mail, i.e. that the current IMAP setup does not match what you’ve setup in the drone scripts. This has nothing to do with SpamSieve, so I see no reason to re-install it.

Reinstalling the SpamSieve application and plug-in will not affect the corpus.

My incoming mail comes into INBOX. When SpamSieve detects a spam message in INBOX, it previously pulled it out of INBOX and placed it into INBOX/Spam. Now it puts it into INBOX/INBOX/Spam.

The behavior of the Train As Spam menu command (only available on the drone) has also changed. Before, the command moved the selected message into INBOX/Spam, now I’m not sure what happens to it. It seems to just disappear.

That would seem like the logical cause, but I’m certain I never touched that setting. The problem started only after fiddling with the Use This Mailbox For command (on both the drone and a client).

SpamSieve still autodetects spam in my inbox and moves it to the spam folder, except that the folder is INBOX/INBOX/Spam, not INBOX/Spam. Also, the Train As Spam command causes the message to disappear, and the AddToSpam and AddToGood scripts no longer work.

I ran Change Settings on the drone. That should affect the drone’s setup, right? (My client doesn’t have SpamSieve installed and hence no such command.)

So I should try deleting, then recreating, the IMAP account in Mail?

Is there a way to reset SpamSieve’s settings to the original clean default state without resetting the corpus?

So the IMAP path prefix is empty?

Meaning that no training appears in SpamSieve’s log? That the messages don’t move?

Yes, but Change Settings affects the commands in the Message menu, which are generally not used with the drone.

Yes, that’s what I’d do.

You could delete the preferences file. But, seriously, there’s nothing that could possible be wrong in the preferences that would cause the behavior that you’re describing.

I finally got around to dealing with this issue, and yes, it was indeed a Mail problem, not a SpamSieve problem. After destroying and then recreating the IMAP account in Mail, the problem went away. Spam is now going into INBOX/Spam instead of INBOX/INBOX/Spam.

Incidentally, I really do mean I had to destroy the account. Simply deleting it wasn’t enough. For some reason Mail was still recreating the INBOX/INBOX/Spam directory on the server. I had to completely wipe out my ~/Library/Mail folder and start over from scratch. At least that fixed it, but man, after so many revisions of Mail, you’d think Apple’d have ironed out crazy bugs like this by now…