Strange New Quirk

Hi Michael,

First, thanks for creating a terrific spam program. I’ve been using it for years, and it has always been dependable.

One strange thing since I downloaded 2.73: every time I launch the app, or Mac Mail launches it, the “Welcome to SpamSieve” pops up first, as does a Statistics pop-up (or screen?). Then after I click off “Welcome”, I get a Help menu pop-up.

It’s no more than an inconvenience to close these three little screens, but why am I getting them at all? I never used to, even after installing a new version.

I even tried to fake it out by setting up the program again, reinstalling the Mail plugin, and doing the statistics reset, but to no avail. What now?

Thank you!

If the corpus does not contain at least one good message and one spam message, SpamSieve assumes that you haven’t set it up yet. So it shows the “Welcome to SpamSieve” window, the Help, and the Statistics window. You can see in the Statistics window how many good and spam messages SpamSieve has been trained with. Is one or both of those numbers zero? If so, you need to train it. If, after training, the Welcome window still comes up, that probably means that SpamSieve was unable to save the corpus to disk (perhaps because of a permissions problem—you could check the Console for more information) or else SpamSieve’s corpus file was deleted.

Thank you!
Michael, thanks for getting back to me promptly, and I’m sorry for my delay in acknowledging your help.

Yes, once I trained some messages, it stopped opening on the Welcome screen. It’s funny, though, I haven’t needed to do that for other updates. My rules had stayed in place, and I had items on my blocklist and whitelist dating back to January '08.

I can’t pretend to understand how the program does its thing, but it does it very well, and for that I’m very grateful to you.

SpamSieve 2.7.3 is the first version that tells you at launch if the corpus is empty. I guess you had some sort of disk mishap that happened to approximately coincide with the new version of SpamSieve.

Experienced same new quirk
Good morning cyannah and Michael,

Just a quick note to share that I, too, experienced what you did, cyannah. I’ve used SpamSieve for years and have never run into this before. The new statistics window that is popping up shows thousands of caught and filtered messages,etc. but suddenly lacks corpus info.

I’ll follow your suggestion, Michael, and I’m sure the issue will resolve.

Thanks for such a fantastic product!

Me, too!
I have been a satisfied SpamSieve user since almost Day 1, and I, too, am experiencing the same problem with the latest upgrade. I followed Michael’s instructions and added both sgood and bad messages to the Corpus, but on the next quit/relaunch, they both showed 0 again and the 3 windows again appeared (Warning window, Help Window, and Statistics Window). Since I have SpamSieve set to quit whenever I quit Entourage, and since I do quit Entourage once daily to run an incremental backup of my entire HD, it is starting to become somewhat of a nuisance to have to deal with the 3 SpamSieve windows each time I relaunch. As others have stated, none of this ever occurred in the past, and while I do appreciate the improvements made in this version of SpamSieve, the disappearing Corpus record and the 3 ever-reappearing windows are slowly becoming a real irritant…

This means that your corpus file was damaged due to a disk problem. The damage probably occurred a long time ago, but you didn’t know because previous versions of SpamSieve didn’t detect it. SpamSieve 2.7.3 does not overwrite a damaged corpus file, so upon re-launch it will show 0 again. Thus, I recommend quitting SpamSieve, deleting the file:

/Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/SpamSieve/Corpus.corpus

and then re-training SpamSieve.