Deleting Junk mail on OS X Mail 10.4.9

Before using SpamSieve I only manually deleted mail that was over 12 months old (I need a business record just in case), but the mail Junk folder was set to delete automatically when one month old.

Now I’ve got SpamSieve there is no auto deletion of Junk (Or is there?) i’ve got a Spam folder that just grows. If manually deleted it gets mixed up with all my other trash. If I let this happen the folder would grow to some 30,000+ messages - I’m sure OSX mail would not cope with that.

What the best method to auto delete (fully - not just to trash) the junk from the spam folder in OSX mail?

Please see this page.

I have followed the instructions on that page, and SpamSieve is putting all my junk mail into the folder called Junk. I have verified that all of my email accounts are set to erase junk mail after one week. However, no messages are ever removed from the Junk folder - it’s got everything in there since I started using SpamSieve months ago. Any suggestions??

Is this the special mailbox with the brown icon? If so, then I’m afraid I have no further suggestions; it must be some kind of issue with Mail.

No, it’s just a regular folder called Junk.

I found the problem - thanks for pointing this out. The brown Junk folder only appears if you have Apple Mail set to be in regular mode, not training mode, which is where mine was. I made that change, the brown folder appeared, and then I changed the SpamSieve rule to put junk into that folder instead of the regular Junk folder I had created manually.

practicality of this method
I have an issue with the practicality of using the Mail “Junk” box for automatic deletion of SS spam. I’m getting ready to install SS where I work for 30+ users. Many will probably be confused by having Mail’s Junk/Not Junk buttons and being told to NOT use them.

SS really needs its own Delete Spam function. For now I’ll probably have them just manually select spam in the Spam folder and Cut (I found that cutting deletes messages without putting them in the trash). Or if they don’t mind spam in their Trash, to delete it that way (I think most people’s trash here is set to the default delete after 1 week). More work, but less confusion.

Agreed. This is why the default SpamSieve setup doesn’t use Mail’s Junk mailbox.

There isn’t a good way to do this with the current version of Mail. For example, if SpamSieve used AppleScript to tell Mail to delete the messages, they’d end up in the trash, mixed in with messages that the user might want to keep.

However, for most users I don’t think it will be a problem to let the spam collect in the Spam mailbox, and manually delete it infrequently.