Setting up a "drone" with multiple IMAP accounts?

I have an old iMac that I want to set up as a “drone” as described in this article:

http://www.macmerc.com/articles/Mini_Media_Mac/368

I want to do this because I also get my email via IMAP on my smart phone, and I want the spam gone before the smart phone downloads it.

However, I have two email accounts I want to de-spam. Any idea if the above procedure will work with more than one email account in the same copy of Mail?

If not, anyone ever tried running two copies of mail?

What would be different for multiple accounts would be “Step 3: Remote Training of SpamSieve.” There are a few options:

  1. You could set it up exactly as described, but use only two training folders (not two per account).

  2. If you want to have separate training folders for each account, you would setup a different script and rule for each account. Each rule, instead of having an “Every Message” condition, would have a condition matching only the messages from that account.

  3. Or, if you plan to do the training from your Mac rather than from the phone, you could simply skip step 3. In that case, you wouldn’t really be setting up a drone. You’d simply follow the normal SpamSieve installation procedure and check the same mail account from your phone.

My guess is that option 3 is what you want. FYI, I don’t recommend trying to run two copies of Mail.

Hi

Apart from your terrible forum registration UI (resetting every field, including the captcha, whenever anything doesn’t suit it, which almost made me give up registering after the third time of frustration), can I say well done for the actual software.

I’ve now set up my mac mini at home as described in this thread, and not only is it the best spam filter I’ve dealt with, it’s able to be remotely managed. I suggest you sell this functionality (i.e scriptability -> remote working) more on your own web site. It’s incredible. Thank-you very much.

I love any software that does what it’s meant to do, well. No taking over things, just does its thing. Your software fits it perfectly. My only suggestion would be to get the mail.app settings procedure into a dialog, it’s unfriendly having a series of message boxes, and doesn’t allow the user to easily appraise the current settings. But that’s set up now, and things are working well. Cheers. When you buy a drink next week, tell yourself that a specific pint (half liter in US, I suppose) is from me, your friend in London, UK. And enjoy it.

Phil

It’s not supposed to reset the fields. Which browser are you using?

SpamSieve for small business - multiple email accounts, workstations & iPhones

I am setting up SpamSieve for our small business. I was planning to use the drone setup discussed in this thread. However, there are 4 employees, each with 2 email accounts. We all use IMAP for both accounts and Apple Mail, as well as iPhones. I wanted the main computer terminal to be the drone, with each person’s individual workstation (and respective iPhones) then spam free. The remote training would I guess then be in everyone’s Mail application, and thru IMAP also on their iPhone.

I was going to set this up by using different user accounts for each employee on the main computer (always on) in the office. This would avoid “multiple copies” of Mail. Or maybe I should just try to have ALL the accounts for every employee set up in one user account on the main computer, dumping ALL the email for every employee into Apple Mail there first.

While everyone has iPhones, I think the majority of the spam training would be done locally. I was just trying to create the most efficient work environment (even while travelling) that would be easy for the employees to manage. With the drone setup, I was hoping to handle all the spam from one location so that the employees would not have to worry about it at all…except for those few messages that might slip through, which would then be trained remotely.

Not sure what will be the best strategy, or what will even work. Is the only solution to set up SpamSieve locally for each person on every computer? The problem there lies in that each employees computer is not always on, so a lot of spam would slip through to their iPhones. What is your recommendation?

Thanks,
Ryan

The main issues, as I see them, are:

  1. Each mail account should only be accessed by one copy of SpamSieve. (It’s not that you shouldn’t have multiple copies of Mail, but rather multiple copies of Mail running SpamSieve
    .) 1. SpamSieve will be more accurate if you have a separate copy for each user, so that each user can have a separate corpus and rules.

Thus, I think it’s better to have one Mac OS X user account on your drone per employee. Each would have a copy of Mail running SpamSieve, and you would have them all logged in at once (via Fast User Switching) so that they can run simultaneously.

Please note that in order for SpamSieve’s Address Book features to work, those user accounts would need to have the users’ own Address Book data, e.g. by importing it manually or using .Mac syncing.

Specific Instructions for Drone with multiple accounts
Hello and please pardon a newbie question. I need more specific instructions. Both accounts are mac.com accounts.

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I followed the instructions to set up acct#1. I have two folders on mac.com and two applescripts. What to do to include acct#2 in the filtering?
How do I edit the existing scripts to incliude acct#2?
How do I edit the rules I made for to incliude acct#2?
The instructions were very helpful for setting up a drone but stopped short of including multiple acct instructions.

[/li]
I’d love to use the same two training folders for both but am confused about how to manage/train spam remotely since iphone only shows one acct’s folders at a time (unlike Mail). How do I put spam from MobileMe acct#2 into the TrainSpam and TrainGood folders located in MobileMe acct#1 manually and how do I write the script to do it on the Drone?

Again. apologies for something that is probably elementary but I’m unfamiliar with Terminal, writing scripts and the command line (whatever that is). I’m a right brained songwriter and an old Mac user (started in 1984) who’s not good at manuals. I only know enough to know that one wrong digit in the script and I’ll be reading Viagra adds for days! Thanks for your help.

Because the iPhone does not let you move messages between accounts, you would need separate rules and mailboxes for each account. For the filtering, instead of the normal “SpamSieve” rule, you would setup one Spam mailbox and one rule per account.

For the training, you would repeat steps 4–8 of the drone setup for each account.

So, in total, you would have three rules, three mailboxes, and two scripts per account.

Thanks for the fast reply. Could I get around this iPhone limitation by doing this; 1) create folders called… “SpamSieveGood” or “SpamSieveSpam” on acct#2.
2) move spam there when on iPhone
3) later (from my laptop) drag the contents of the above mentioned folder to the “TrainGood” and “TrainSpam” folders on acct#1
4) let the drone handle it from there.

I check email from an iMac, a MacBook Pro and my iphone. In the past, I installed SpamSieve everywhere with confusing results. I’d like to set up a drone spam filter on a 3rd computer (a headless mac mini) which right now is only used to send video to AppleTV. If iphone is preventing the most elegant solution, I’ll do without marking spam from it.

Meanwhile, I will follow your advice and attempt setup with three rules, three mailboxes, and two scripts per account. Again, thanks for your help.

Yes, that should work.

The Setting Up a Spam Filtering Drone section has been updated with instructions for multiple accounts.