Problems with Apple Mail also kill SpamSieve

I am evaluating SpamSieve. So far I like it a lot, as a recent immigrant to the Mac world. I had used various solutions that were good in the Windows world.

However, I have just experienced a situation that does not seem to be documented as to the proper recovery.

Yesterday something happened to really mess up my Apple Mail, where Mail would not start, nor function properly, with duplicate pointers in the mboxs and so on. I had to call Apple tech support. We finally got it sorted out, but it required recreating the com.apple.mail.plist, which meant recreating my mail accounts.

After this was done I noticed that SpamSieve did not seem to be working. However, the SpamSieve rule was still in place. So the result was that **all **new mail was going into the spam folder, but not being colored as spam. The Ctrl-Cmd-S and Ctrl-Cmd-G functions were no longer working either.

To fix this I did the following:

  1. Load Spam Sieve.
  2. Use the “Install Apple Mail Plugin” and restart Mail.
  3. Go into the spam folder and use Ctrl-Cmd-S and Ctrl-Cmd-G to mark each new email appropriately.

What I am concerned about is what other steps to I need to do. For example, it seems that the training is probably lost. Are there any other setup steps that are needed? I am just not sure everything is “back to normal” yet.

This is actually a FAQ.

Deleting Mail’s preferences file has the effect of telling it to stop loading any plug-ins. Choosing “Install Apple Mail Plug-In” from the SpamSieve menu will get things working again.

No other steps should be needed; the training should still be there. You can see from the Statistics window whether SpamSieve still has whitelist/blocklist rules and messages in its corpus.

Thanks for your response. It seems that I pretty much stumbled into the proper recovery actions.

I looked at the statistics and it seems that the corpus has not gotten lost. So I am hoping I am good to go now.