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.
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.
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.