I’ve had a look through the forum but haven’t seen this problem raised: when I launch Mail, or try to launch SpamSieve independently, it hangs. I can’t get it to launch at all.
Any thoughts?
Well, it ‘bounces’ for a few minutes and then stops. I’ve launched it and waited 15 minutes now and nothing. When I ctrl-click on it the menu says ‘Application Not Responding’, which is how it’s been for a while now.
I’ve got a Powerbook G4.
Please try renaming the file:
/Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/SpamSieve/Corpus.corpus
to CorpusOld.corpus and then launch SpamSieve. Does that help? If so, you could re-train SpamSieve with a smaller number of messages or send me the old corpus so that I can try to compact it for you.
Yep, that did the trick, Michael - thank you!
Leopard hang related
I have been experiencing a similar problem. In fact I had assumed this was some variant of the Mail HTML problem. It had been occurring for the past three or four days. In my case the problem occurred on two machines, my main machine where I do 90% of my email and my laptop.
Prior to checking this forum, I assumed it was a Leopard/Mail/Spamsieve interaction problem so I rebooted one of my machines using 10.4.11 and started using Apple Mail 2.1 with SpamSieve 2.6.5 and did not have any problems.
On the machine, which was still having problems, I then followed your instruction for renaming the Corpus file. Mail 3.1 under Leopard then began to work. Note, on it’s first operation it seemed to get stuck on “Evaluating a message” in the Acitivity window. I could not quit Mail and had to Force Quit it. However, before doing so, it did update the Inbox messages where previously it was only showing messages as of three days ago.
While the fix you have suggested at first appeared to work, I was a bit surprised because I use the machines independently of each other where the main machine tends to process all of the Spam, I leave Mail up when I’m away so that if I retrieve email from my mobile phone my inbox will be spam free. Thus, I expect that my laptop sees far fewer real spam messages than my desktop machine.
They do not have identical corpus files although they were initially trained on the same messages. The Corpus window displays “3,745 messages; 142,657 words” on one machine and “3,577 messages; 129,211 words” for the other machine. I actually was surprised that these were so similar in size. Given that I only use one of the machines for email a few times a week or when traveling.
I guess I am questioning whether the problem is truly Corpus file size related. I am using a G5 Quad processor with 8GB memory as my desktop machine and a Mac Book Pro with 2GB memory as my laptop. They should both have plenty of horsepower. Also, in my performance monitoring during the problem Mail will be using 2 to 3% of the machine and Spamsieve will be using 0%.
Note after renaming the Corpus and restarting Mail, things worked fine only for a short period of time. My 10.5 machine even with an untrained Corpus hung again within a few email messages, four to be exact. As I previously mentioned the Mail Activity window would indicate that Mail was either “Evaluating Message…” or “Performing Rule Action”. In both cases it stays there forever. The progress bar never displays anything other than a thin sliver of blue indicating it is starting.
The only other Mail related anomaly I have noticed is that on the 10.5 machine I am getting spurious receipt sounds even when messages are not displayed. Note, I have checked preferences and Mail is set for none and only Spamsieve has sounds.
When I attempt to quit Mail, the Mail Activity window will switch to “STOPPING: Performing Rule” or “STOPPING: Evaluating Message” but it never actually completes. I need to force quit it.
I guess it’s an accolade to Spamsieve that for the moment I am thinking of returning to 10.4 rather than using 10.5 without Spamsieve. However, I would really like both. Any suggestions?
This is because SpamSieve only trains itself with the messages that it thinks are unusual/interesting, plus the ones that you manually correct it with.
In your case, probably not, since the corpus size problems mainly affect SpamSieve’s launch time.
Do you have a file:
/Users/<username>/Library/Mail/Bundles/GrowlMail.mailbundle
installed? If so, please try uninstalling it. GrowlMail could explain the sounds as well as the hangs.
The only Bundle I have in that location is SpamSieve.mailbundle.
I did use under 10.4. However, due to issues with 10.5 I have not attempted to use Growl under 10.5.
Mail on my 10.5 machine has been hung all day now. Let me know if you would like me to Sample it or try something else. The Mail Activity window indicates “Evaluating Message on the Inbox” and then it has three other items two of which are connecting to the server for the same Inbox and the final item in the activity window is “Fetching new mail” for the same inbox. They have literally been in that state for hours. Mail’s now using about 6% of cpu and has 14 threads.
Any other thoughts?
Thanks for sending the samples. Unfortunately, I don’t see anything very helpful in them. Mail doesn’t seem to be doing anything with SpamSieve or with any other rules. It seems to be freezing up while trying to sync your IMAP account with the server. I’m guessing that this is a bug in Mail, but I realize that’s not very prescriptive. I suppose you could try creating a new Mac OS X user account, setup Mail there, and see whether it works better. That might help if there’s some kind of local problem with Mail’s files in your account.
Okay thanks. I actually thought that I should try it without Spamsieve and I haven’t since it worked as soon as I went back to 10.4. I’ll try disabling Spamsieve and see if the issue goes away. My apologies for not having done that before posting.
OK, but really I was suggesting that you try Mail and SpamSieve together in a fresh account, since I don’t think the problem has to do with SpamSieve.
Okay, I understood you said to setup a new account. However, I’ve just done the following. I Force Quit Mail. I restarted it and before a new message could arrive I deselected the Spamsieve Rule in Mail preferences. I then Quit Mail. That worked. I then removed the Spamsieve Bundle. I restarted Mail sent it two messages without any problems. I then quit email. Put the Spamsieve Bundle back in place. I turned the Spansieve Rule back on. Mail then came up okay. Processed all messages in the Inbox and then on the first new message it hung again.
Thus if there is an oddity with the account, it only seems to cause problems when Spamsieve is active.
Any more tests? I’m happy to try a clean setup with a new user account and the like. However, I’ll do that tomorrow.
Disabling the SpamSieve rule and uninstalling the bundle have at least four effects: (a) Mail doesn’t examine the rule conditions, (b) the bundle doesn’t send the message to SpamSieve for analysis, (c) SpamSieve doesn’t tell Mail that the spam messages are junk, (d) Mail doesn’t apply the rule actions to the spam messages. So this doesn’t really tell you whether the problem had anything to do with SpamSieve.
A better test would be to install the SpamSieve bundle and enable the rule, but change the name of the rule to DisabledSpamSieve. This will let you see whether the problem is with (a) or (d). (And, temporarily, all the messages will go the Spam mailbox.)
You could also click here to tell SpamSieve not to mark the spam messages as junk. This would let you see whether the problem is with (c). (Click here to revert the change.)
I have run the following variants. There was one test I was a bit unclear about and ran that both ways. And there was one test which was an erroneous execution of your instructions which caused it to hang.
When I renamed Spamsieve Rule to DisableSpamsieve. Things worked all messages went to Spamsieve folder but Mail application did not hang. The Click Here for setting YES and NO did not have any effect if the rule was renamed. I’m not sure if it was supposed to cause it to not move things if the rule was renamed.
I then thought you might have meant to have the Rule named Spamsieve and active and then set to NO and YES. With either setting Mail hung on the first message received after it had processed the original email.
The curious result which was due to my error in implementing your instructions is that in one of my trials I first deactivated the Spamsieve rule prior to renaming it. When I renamed it to DisableSpamsieve while it was inactive Mail then asked me if I wanted to apply the rule to which I erroneously said yes. This then moved all of the good messages to my Spamsieve folder. The curious result was that Mail hung during the copy of the emails. I of course should have copied my Inbox before I did all these experiments. I now have to figure out which of the messages in my Spamsieve mail folder were the 254 good messages in my Inbox. Do you have any suggestions? I was thinking of moving them all to my Inbox and then applying the Spamsieve rule to the Inbox just as I did in error. This would hopefully result in the majority of the Spam and Good messages being sorted properly. Does that sound right to you? I’ll do this on my 10.4 machine which doesn’t have the hang problem. Otherwise, under 10.5 it would hang.
Any more tests you would like? The only thing that seems to let my Mail work properly but without Spamsieve functionality is either renaming the Spamsieve rule which results in everything going to the Spam folder or disabling the Spamsieve rule which results in everything being in my Inbox. However, in both these case Mail does not hang. Except in the rename case where it moved a lot of items.
Sorry for not being clear. The AppleMailPlugInSetIsJunk setting only has an effect if the rule is enabled and named SpamSieve.
OK, so that may eliminate (c) as the cause of the problem.
That would seem to indicate (a) or (d) as the cause (or one of the causes) of the problem.
That’s what I’d do.
It would be interesting to see a sample log from when it hangs with the DisableSpamSieve rule. Then I could see whether this looks like the same problem as when SpamSieve is fully enabled.
Secondly, since no one else has reported a hang that’s caused by SpamSieve, (and based on the earlier sample logs) I continue to believe that SpamSieve is probably not the ultimate cause of the problem, and so I still recommend trying a fresh Mail/SpamSieve setup in a new user account.