3.13   Correct All Mistakes

SpamSieve examines each incoming message and moves the spam messages into a separate spam mailbox. It leaves the good messages alone, so they will stay in the inbox or be processed by your other mail rules. In order to keep SpamSieve’s accuracy high, you’ll need to tell it about any mistakes that it makes:

• If you find a spam message that’s not in the spam mailbox, train it as spam. You should do this even if you think the message might confuse SpamSieve. It does not matter what color the message is; only spam messages that are not in the spam mailbox are considered to be mistakes.
• If you find a good message in the spam mailbox, train it as good.

To correct a mistake, train SpamSieve using the menu commands recommended at the end of the “Setting Up” section of the manual for your mail program.

You must correct all of SpamSieve’s mistakes or its accuracy will deteriorate over time. Also, the sooner you correct SpamSieve, the better. By promptly correcting SpamSieve, you ensure that it’s always acting based on accurate information. After the initial training, it is not necessary (or recommended) to train SpamSieve with messages that are not mistakes.

If you make a mistake and tell SpamSieve that a message is spam when it is actually good (or vice-versa), simply correct yourself as you would correct SpamSieve. That is, if the message is good, train it as good; if it is spam, train it as spam. SpamSieve will “undo” the previous, incorrect, training.

Note: Always train SpamSieve using the menu commands. Do not move the messages into or out of the spam mailbox yourself.

Disable Other Spam Filters and Rules

When using SpamSieve, turn off any other spam filters that you’ve installed. Disable any manual rules that you’ve created to catch spam messages, or transfer them to SpamSieve’s blocklist. This will make it clear which messages SpamSieve did and didn’t catch, which is necessary for you to be able to properly correct it.

Using SpamSieve With Multiple Macs

If you are accessing the same (non-POP) mail account from multiple Macs running SpamSieve, it can be difficult to know which copy of SpamSieve needs to be trained to correct a mistake. There are several ways to deal with this:

1. Run SpamSieve on a single Mac and let it clean your inbox for all the Macs. All the training is done from that Mac. This is the simplest solution.
2. Run SpamSieve on a single Mac using the drone setup. This is like (1) but lets you remotely train SpamSieve when you’re away from that Mac.
3. Run SpamSieve on all the Macs and turn off auto-training. This will have lower filtering accuracy than (1) or (2) but is useful in situations when you do not have a single Mac that is always available for mail filtering.
4. Run SpamSieve on all the Macs, being careful to only let one copy of SpamSieve run at a time, and to always correct all the mistakes before switching to another Mac. This will give better filtering accuracy than (3) but is a lot more work.

You can also copy SpamSieve’s training data from one Mac to another.