2.7.7 Drone filtering - Apple Mail rule trigger?

I’ve just installed SpamSieve 2.7.7 for use with Apple Mail 4.2 on OS X 10.6.2 and a MobileMe account. I also have an iPhone so have also set up the drone filtering exactly as described in the manual “5.5.7 Setting up a Spam Filtering Drone”. This is a fantastic product and feature!

There is one aspect of the filtering which I want to check is correct, or an error and I’ve made a mistake. I think this is about the way Apple Mail runs its rules…

Basically when I move an email to either of the TrainGood or TrainSpam folders on my MobileMe account, I was expecting the rules to instantly be run at that point and deal with the TrainGood/Spam folders.

However what seems to happen is that the rules (which rely on the Account condition) only get triggered when at some future point a new email arrives in my inbox. Hence if a mis-diagnosed spam email is moved to TrainGood it won’t actually get processed and returned to inbox until some other e-mail happens to land in my inbox.

Is this the expected behaviour or have I missed something? If not, is there an Apple Mail setting somewhere I can tweak to run the rules when you move an existing email between folders (which doesn’t seem to trigger the rules currently).

That’s the expected behavior. Mail’s only trigger is new messages arriving; it cannot trigger based on a message moving between mailboxes. If you want, you could perhaps use another piece of software, e.g. iCal, to run the script on a repeating schedule. You would need to replace the perform_mail_action handler with a run handler.

OK thanks for the clarification. If I can figure out any smart ways to schedule it or trigger it I’ll post back. I should be able to do something as I have this running on a Mac Mini used as a server.