Disappearing Mail.app messages -- possible link to SpamSieve

hello, and thanks for spamsieve, which has worked extremely well for quite some time.

i’ve been running leopard for a few weeks, now. last night, i left my computer running, and this morning, there were no new messages in mail. since that simply never happens, i relaunched mail and saw several new messages appear. i read a few of them, then answered a phone call. and when i returned, the new messages i had started to read had all disappeared from my inbox. relaunching mail revealed the messages again, but within 3-5 minutes, they disappeared again.

after seeing this 3 or 4 times, i found an existing thread about this issue in the apple discussions, so i added a post under the name “Syncopator”:

i began to suspect spamsieve, only because i was hearing the “new mail sound” every 60 seconds – even though no new messages were being received (and because i have sounds disabled in mail.app).

so i disabled spamsieve (by quitting the process and removing the mailbundle, but leaving other items intact; then relaunching mail), and so far – about 45 minutes, now – no messages have disappeared.

it’s difficult to believe that spamsieve would cause this, but i’m simply reporting my observations, so far. (please note that i’ve asked, in the apple discussion, if any others experiencing this issue are also running spamsieve. so far, no one has definitively confirmed using spamsieve, but i’m watching closely.)

could this be a simple matter of corrupt preferences? i have yet to try trashing them.

thanks.

Are you using POP or IMAP?

I’ve seen cases where the notification sound keeps playing. This can happen if a message is “stuck” on the server. Mail keeps downloading the same message and showing it to SpamSieve as if it’s new. Only one message appears in Mail’s user interface, though. You can see whether this is the case by checking SpamSieve’s log to see if the same message is “Predicted: Good” over and over again. Logging into the mail account with Web mail and deleting the message can fix this problem.

I don’t think SpamSieve could be causing the messages to disappear, since it doesn’t do anything with them. The action of the SpamSieve rule is what moves the message to the Spam mailbox, and this works the same as with any other Mail rule.

It would be interesting to see whether the missing messages are on your hard disk at all—perhaps you can find them with Spotlight even though they aren’t visible within Mail.

No, but it could be due to a corrupt Envelope Index:

/Users/<username>/Library/Mail/Envelope Index

Thanks for the reply. I agree that it seemed illogical that SpamSieve would cause the problem. Yet, when I removed the SpamSieve mailbundle, the issue went away. Perhaps the removal forced Mail to “regroup,” somehow, and the issue (while not caused by SpamSieve) was resolved. I don’t how.

Thanks. I found another thread from January where you had suggested, to another user with a similar issue, deleting that index. So I did that yesterday, as well, for good measure. So far so good, so I think I’m out of the woods.

Thanks again.