Mail.app continuing problems

Well, I have 9 days left on the demo, and I’m still not sure whether I’ll be purchasing, owing to the problems that keep cropping up. Thing is, I don’t know if they are Mail.app issues, or SS issues. The problem with my problem is that the issues are inconsistent, and don’t seem to follow a predictable pattern.

For example, just now I found about a dozen messages that had been marked as spam/read and moved into junk earlier back in my inbox, still read but no longer marked as spam. I had to retrain them as spam to get them out of the inbox and into junk.

And the other day I was examining my Unread Smart Folder, and before my eyes, every email in it was processed as spam. I had to the dig thru my Junk folder to rescue the lost msgs and make sure SS unlearned them.

Any thoughts on what would cause these kinds of problems?

The only consistent problem I have is one that I think is a bug with Mail. When I wake my machine from sleep, it immediately downloads new mail, but is slow to process rules, so that everything that is new since sleeping does not get processed, forcing me to Apply Rules to the unread folder to get things in their right places. If mail holds off on checking for new mail for a minute or two (say if Airport had been off), then rules work fine.

Anyone else have this kind of problem, and have a solution to it?

Thanks in advance,
Andrew

Please clarify what you mean by “marked as spam” and “processed as spam.” Does SpamSieve’s log say that these messages were “Predicted: Spam”?

I may be able to tell what’s going on if you send me SpamSieve’s log file:

/Users/<username>/Library/Logs/SpamSieve/SpamSieve Log.log

and Mail’s Rules file:

/Users/<username>/Library/Mail/MessageRules.plist

via e-mail. But my general recommendation is that if strange things are happening you should use the simplest possible setup, the one recommended in the SpamSieve manual. Once you get that working, you can try something more complicated, like using Mail’s built-in Junk mailbox. If you try too many new things at once, it’s difficult to see what’s going on and where the problem might be.

Michael -

I really don’t understand why using one folder vs another to store spam should make a difference in how SS works, but I’m going to use a local folder and turn off all Mail.app junk related functions for now, and see if things work better.

The two things I mention above seem to be related to some kind of late processing, i.e. messages are originally automatically detected as spam, marked as read, colored, and moved to Junk, and then some time later reprocessed to lose some of these attributes. The reappearing junk mail problem just happened again. When I clicked on the Junk folder to examine its contents, it was empty, and all of the old spam that had been in there was no longer marked as junk, not colored as spam, and back in my inbox. I ran rules on it again, and it was moved back into junk.

I’m going to just go with the simple setup for at least a few days, and then see how I like it and if it works better. Really the only reason I like the Junk mailbox is that it is easy to distinguish from every other folder. I’m sure I can get used to not having it.

Andrew

It doesn’t, but it will eliminate the variable of what Mail’s junk mail filter may be doing.

It sounds like there’s something strange going on here, since reprocessing is not normal, but I can’t help you further without seeing the files mentioned above.