Hello-
I’m new to SpamSieve (this is my first full day with it), so if this is something well known, I apologize. I searched all over this forum but couldn’t find a post that addressed this issue specifically.
So this is a post to help anyone who is in a similar situation as I was. It took me awhile to figure out what my problem was (haha) but once I did I was able to fix it. Here’s the story:
I have multiple IMAP email accounts (most are Gmail, however, some aren’t) and I use mail.app in Lion. When using SpamSieve, one must disable the apple junk mail filter, which in turn “enables,” so to speak, the Gmail spam folders in each apple mailbox (this isn’t actually the case, spam is ALWAYS enabled in Gmail and hence the folders are always there… it’s just that with the Apple junk mail filter on you don’t see the Gmail spam folders or interact with them in any way).
This is all well and good except that now, whenever Google deemed something as spammy, it would put the message into its own spam folder (the ones that I mentioned above). SpamSieve doesn’t seem to do anything with these. All I know is that I was suddenly getting messages in these deep dark folders regularly and then had to navigate to them manually to train SpamSieve.
The problem was that I was now back to where I was before SpamSieve: manually dealing with spam. This prompted me to create a SmartMailbox to collect all of the messages in the Gmail spam folders so I could deal with them all at once without having to navigate to each individual folder, but this was still very annoying. I wanted things automated.
So I thought about this problem a bit and realized something very very simple: Google was sending messages to it’s own spam folders which were separate from the inbox… therefore SpamSieve couldn’t do anything with them. DUH! As I said: something very very simple… and since I never log in to Gmail to check messages I had completely forgotten about this aspect of the Gmail experience.
So, long story long, I did a bit of lookin’ on theGoogle and discovered that while there was no way to actually disable Google’s spam filter, one could in fact work around it:
Log in to each Google account in question, and create a filter that searches for the @ symbol in the TO field (settings>Filters>Create a new filter), and set it to “Never send it to Spam”.
So now, while the Gmail “Spam” folders will still be under the white Gmail folders in each mailbox, nothing will be sent there by theGoogle and therefore SpamSieve can do it’s work.
Boom. That’s it. Simple.