Switched Gmail account to IMAP, now spam not being filtered?

I recently switched my Gmail account from POP to IMAP. I’m using Mail.app. For one thing, while set up as POP, the gmail spam never gets copied to your machine, so it’s not really an issue (and their filtering seems very efficient, btw; never seen a false positive).

Now, set up as IMAP, the gmail spam appears in the local Gmail mailbox in Mail.app (in a “spam” sub-mailbox), but doesn’t seem to get noticed by SpamSieve. In other words, I get the little number icon next to that mailbox, but the messages just stay there. If I select them and tell SS to “train as spam”, they get moved to the main Junk folder. Is there any way to make that happen automatically, like with my POP accounts?

I have just gone into my Rules and edited the SpamSieve rule to specifically check the Gmail account, on top of the primary All Messages criterion. Is that a possible solution, or not necessary at all? If it’s the latter, what do I need to do to get it working right???

Thanks very much in advance!
John

I don’t think so. The way Mail (and all the other IMAP clients I’ve seen) works is that it only treats messages in the inbox as new. So those are the only messages that are filtered with the rules (and, thus, SpamSieve).

So, how do I get SS to see and process those messsages? I don’t see a way to get Mail.app to move the messages from the Gmail spam mailbox to the Inbox. I tried making a rule to make it happen, but don’t know if it will work or not. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see…

If you have any other suggestions, I’d love to hear them!

Thanks,
John

A rule won’t work because, like I said, Mail only applies rules to messages in the inbox. It’s a chicken and egg problem. You can, however, manually apply your rules (including SpamSieve) to other messages by choosing Message > Apply Rules.

Never mind I miss-read the lead post –

I have gmail downloading my ISP accounts via pop3 as a means for long term storage. As a result every mail arriving on my Mac shows up as being read and fails to be processed by Spamsieve so to fix it I added a rule before Spamsieve that marked every new email as unread. Seems to be working well all day.

If it’s working for you that’s great, but I’m skeptical that the “mark as unread” rule is what’s making the difference. Why would Mail apply that rule but not the SpamSieve one?

Hmm, this morning I had a few emails in spam and 300 unfiltered, obvious spams, in my inbox and for some reason the rule to turn them into unread email didn’t fire.Is there any way to force a rule on an read message in imap?

I thought you were using POP. Anyway, I don’t think there’s any way to make Mail automatically apply rules to messages that it thinks aren’t new. However, you can manually apply the rules by selecting the messages and choosing Message > Apply Rules. And the rules will work automatically for new messages.