Multiple Machines and IMAP

Hello:

I am using spamsieve on a macbook pro and have set it up
so that mail it identifies as spam gets moved to the SPAM folder
on my machine (this is how the manual recommends it).

My question: what do I do if I use multiple machines and some don’t use
spamsieve (not under my control) ? If my macbook pro moves messages
to local storage, are they deleted from the server ? If they are,
its possible that I won’t see them from another machine ?

Both accounts I check mail on use IMAP and I am using Apple mail.

Thanks

If the spam messages are moved to a local Spam folder then, yes, they’re removed from the server. Since they’re no longer on the server, another Mac wouldn’t see them (whether or not it has SpamSieve).

If you do want to see the spam messages from the other Mac, then you would need to change the SpamSieve rule to move the messages to a folder on the server.

SpamSieve on multiple machines with IMAP - a workable approach
I have been running SpamSieve on three different boxes for several months with good results, and without using the “drone” approach (which incidentally looks interesting.)

Two of the machines are almost always running. One faces the intarweb and routes my household, and the other is a “communal” box in our living area. The third is my notebook, which is running only part of the time.

I got around the question of “how do you know which machine and filterset marked a given piece of mail as spam so you can train it” by telling each of the machines to put spam in a dedicated folder on the server.

When I look at my IMAP folders, I see something like this:


Spam - desktop box
Spam - communal box
Spam - notebook

For purposes of training SpamSieve that a given piece of spam has leaked through to my inbox, I don’t really care which machine gets the lesson. Someday when it is possible to merge the corpuses (corpii?) I’ll do it, but in the interim it doesn’t really matter.

What matters for me is training the specific machine which occasionally marks something good as spam.

When I’m scanning through the IMAP spam folders and find something which has been misclassified as spam I flag it and then tell SpamSieve that it is good next time I’m using the guilty machine so it doesn’t do it again.

While this approach lacks elegance, it gets the job done and serves to provide me with a usable inbox on those occasions when I don’t have access to any of my own machines and have to use the web interface to check my mail.

I suspect that something could be cobbled together using a variation of the “drone” approach to make this process cleaner.

But it matters because the one that let the spam through is going to continue thinking that message is good.

Corpora.

Yes, using only one copy of SpamSieve with each account would be somewhat simpler.

But it matters because the one that let the spam through is going to continue thinking that message is good.

Ooops. Heh. O yeah.
Hmmm.

Looks like I should think about implementing the “drone.”

Mail.app (IMAP) on a dual G5 drone problems and a brute-force fix
I have noticed problems with mail.app on my dual G5 2.3 box. For the record, there were problems before spamsieve, and unsurprisingly, they didn’t go away while I was playing with spamsieve.

I have noticed an issue with mail.app on the G5 box where mail.app crashes gracelessly – that is to say, when you ask it to check for new mail (either automagically or explicitly using the dropdown menu for same) mail.app will tell you blithely that there’s nothing new waiting to come down. Alas, a simple check using another box or web interface proves this to be incorrect.

Unfortunately, the only way you can tell that mail.app has failed is to check things by hand. A force-quit and restart of mail.app fixes everything until the next time it fails, again without any notice.

Anecdotally, I have a at least one friend who has had similar issues with mail.app on his dual G5 machine.

The scripts in the “drone” publication also fail to work correctly on my dual G5 machine.

I moved everything over to a mostly unused first-gen mini that was sitting around, and all works flawlessly. Same compiled scripts, no changes from the G5 box.

I have been tempted to reinstall the dual G5 machine completely to see if this fixes the problem, but simply haven’t had the time.

The bottom line is that if the drone scripts seem not to work for you, there is a chance that there is an issue with your box rather than with spamsieve and the drone scripts.