"Train As Good" = disappeared!

I received two important e-mails this evening, which I found in my Junk folder. After selecting both, I chose “Train as Good” from the menu (by mouse, not by hot-keys). They both appeared to be moved to the Inbox as usual, but when I looked they weren’t there. In fact, they weren’t anywhere! Not in Inbox, Junk, Trash…

This has happened before, and every time it both frightens and frustrates me. How many e-mails have been completely lost like this? And why is my SpamSieve so cavalier with my messages?

Any help on how the get the messages back? And any suggestions about how to prevent this in the future?

I doubt the messages are gone. SpamSieve doesn’t do anything cavalier; it just asks Mail to move the messages to the inbox. Have you tried searching for them with Spotlight? It’s possible that they’re in the inbox of an account that you weren’t looking under or that’s disabled in Mail’s preferences.

Another possibility is that your Mail database is damaged.

Disabled…
You were right, Michael-- they were in an inbox for a disabled mail account. Search/Spotlight within Mail didn’t turn them up-- only a global Spotlight search did.

Another message this morning did exactly the same thing.

So, what’s the fix? How do I avoid the multiple steps of Train as Good >> search in global Spotlight >> find missing message >> re-open in Mail…?

And, here is a broader question related to the first: is this “training as good” actually taking effect? Will my corpus be improved by these? And/or with SpamSieve send future messages of like type to that disabled inbox?

There are two ways to prevent this from happening:

  1. Don’t put your disabled account at the top of the list in Mail’s preferences.
  2. Make sure that the “To” address for the message is listed in your account preferences, so that SpamSieve can tell which account the message was sent to and move it to the appropriate inbox.

Sure, why wouldn’t it be?