SpamSieve possible preventing other Mail rules from working?

Hi,

I’ve signed up for the 30 day SpamSieve filter, and I’ve been very impressed with its results so far, but I’ve noticed a possible side effect which could be causing some problems.

I’ve implemented the SpamSieve rule and placed it at the top of my list of rules, as recommended. After that, I have about 30 or 40 rules that are supposed to identify messages of certain types and then delete them if they’re older than a day.
The problem is, when SpamSieve is running, these rules do not work unless I go into each individual rule, change a parameter slightly (for example, “Subject begins with ‘Post’” turned into “Subject begins with 'Post '” and then apply the change to the rule. If I disable the SpamSieve rule, then all my deletions work as expected, but then I’ve got a bunch of spam in my inbox.

Since SpamSieve has saved me so much time deleting and dealing with spam, I will likely pick it up when the trial expires, but I wanted to know if anyone else had experienced this, and if there’s any solution to it. Thanks.

Mark Nyon

The SpamSieve rule should work like a normal Mail rule. If SpamSieve thinks the message is not spam (you can see from the log what SpamSieve thought), Mail should continue applying the other rules.

I don’t understand how you are intending your rules to work. If they match messages that are older than a day, I would not expect them to match any incoming messages, since those are new. Are you using them by manually applying the rules? If so, how? Perhaps a smart mailbox would be a better solution to this problem.

I understand better now
Thanks for the help Michael. For some reason I had thought that the rules were applied to all mail in an inbox. After reading your response, I did some research on using keywords to apply rules to all messages in a mailbox (command-a to select all messages, command-option-l to run rules on all messages in that box).

I think this satisfies my immediate need, although I do need to look into Smart Mailboxes more. The deletion rules exist because many emails I receive are either notifications of events, or postings on mailing lists that I check periodically. In the first case, I only need to acknowledge that they have occurred. In the second case, if I haven’t check on a particular message/thread within the first day, I probably will not, and thus those threads can be deleted.Any feedback on better ways to implement this logic is appreciated. Thanks for the quick response.

Mark

I think a smart mailbox would work better because then you wouldn’t have to select the messages and re-apply the rules (including the SpamSieve rule). Instead, you would click on the smart mailbox to see the old messages, select them, and press Delete.