Email disappears both online (IMAP)& hard drive after mistake using spamsieve

hello:

I couldn’t find this anywhere so hope it’s not a duplicate. Using apple mail on os x 10.4.7

Problem: I mistakenly identified an IMAP email message to be spam with the pull-down Command “Train As Spam”. Now I can’t find it anywhere – nowhere not online at the original email account or on the hard drive.

I know it was there because before I quit mail and spam sieve and restarted them, I temporarily found the mysterious disappeared vanished email using spotlight – from spotlight I could open the message, but I couldn’t locate it in the finder or within apple mail, but spotlight let me double click and open the thing as a discrete email message in its own apple mail window.

However, after I quit and then relaunched spamsieve and apple mail, not even spotlight can find the damn thing anymore. I have not emptied the trash.

Does anyone know where/how to find the disappeared email?

And why did it disappear / vanish online at the original IMAP account too; shouldn’t it still be there? I did not tell apple mail to synch with the imap account – does it do that automatically with spamsieve?

I am totally unfamiliar and new to spamsieve – just demo-ing it so if this is what happens, I don’t think spam sieve will work for me.

thanks for any help and if you can tell me what happened and how to reverse it, okay maybe i will change my mind and purchase it.

When you use the “Train as Spam” command, SpamSieve asks Mail to move the message into the local Spam mailbox that you created. So it should be there. I suppose it’s possible that Mail encountered an error saving the file in Spam but still deleted the IMAP message, but I’ve never heard of that happening before. You could check the /Applications/Utilities/Console application to see if Mail has printed any error messages there.

If something like this ever happens again, make a copy of the file that you found with Spotlight. Otherwise, if Mail was going to delete the file, quitting Mail will probably only hasten that.

SpamSieve does not communicate with your mail server or ask Mail to sync with it. However, it’s possible that Mail does so when SpamSieve asks it to move the message. If you want, you can tell SpamSieve to keep the spam on your IMAP server rather than in a local mailbox.

This isn’t what happens. As far as I can remember, no one else has reported messages disappearing like this. Do other messages that you train as spam move to the Spam mailbox? Do the incoming messages automatically moved by SpamSieve end up there? It might help to use Mail’s Rebuild command in the Mailbox menu.

thanks for responding. this is really confounding. it wasn’t anywhere in the log. still can’t find it online or on the hard drive. [luckily, i know what the item # it is associated with because it is in a different site in a database online and I can backtrack for the details of the order – but the notification email itself is completely vanished.]

there are no other bundles than spam sieve in mail library.

I don’t know what the rebuild command is or where to find it. I drug the envelope file to the trash from the library/mail folder but have not restarted mail yet.

and next time if this happens ever again, I will definitely ‘save as’ or copy and paste the email contents into a text file.

do you know if there is another way through the terminal to search for it? where do these emails go? shouldn’t it be somewhere on my disk?

thanks.

The Rebuild command is in Mail’s Mailbox menu. After dragging the .emlx file back into place, you can use the Rebuild command on that mailbox to get Mail to notice that the message is now in that mailbox. Otherwise, it would just ignore that file.

You could use the “find” command in Terminal or a utility like File Buddy.

I don’t know what happened, so I don’t know where they would be. If, for some reason, Mail deleted the messages, then they would not be on the disk.

IMAP messages disappearing after a while…
I experienced the same problem on OSX server (10.4.9).
Messages are transferred to the user IMAP folder and then they suddenly vanish !!!
I checked everything (setting all logs to DEBUG level, putting off spam and virus control on the server), but with no success. I also indicated the server to copy all messages to postmaster. In the postmaster mailbox I can see messages directed to the user xyz, but actually the message never reached the xyz imap mailbox.
Getting mad.

Is this related to the Cyrus imapd?
All suggestions are highly welcome.

If you would like to eliminate SpamSieve as a cause of this problem, delete the folder:

/Users/<username>/Library/Mail/Bundles/SpamSieve.mailbundle

and restart Mail. The SpamSieve rule will then be just a regular rule that moves every message to the Spam mailbox; SpamSieve will not be involved.