No more "Erase Junk Mail" after updating

I’ve been using SpamSieve for years now, and never had a problem. Now I have the first one: After updating to 10.8 and its new Mail, SpamSieve works like always, but I have lost the function “Erase Junk Mail” (and the keyboard shortcut for it) from the “Mailbox” menu. Well, it is still there, but is greyed out. Has this to do with SpamSieve at all? I guess it does, but I’m not completely sure. What can I do about it?

I’m not sure why this problem is only recently affecting you, but there has been a bug since 10.5 where Apple Mail doesn’t enable this command unless you are using its own junk filter, and have not customized the rule.

I had severe problems with Mail after updating to 10.8, so I had set up everything from scratch, including SpamSieve. In the process, I followed your instructions in the SpamSieve manual, where at some point you suggest to enable Mail’s own spam filter and then configure “Perform custom actions”. I now found that if I click “Move it to the junk mailbox” instead, that the greyed-out function returns and works well. I still have to see if Spamsieve works normally after that (if not, I’ll come back here to ask your advice).
Maybe I had this “Move…” option active in my older setting that got screwed up, that my be the reason why I never had this problem before.

It sounds like you’re following the optional instructions on the Automatically Deleting Old Spam Messages page.

I do not recommend using that configuration because Mail’s built-in junk mail filter should be off when using SpamSieve.

No, I had followed the instructions to use a Spam-Mailbox that has a different name than Junk. This section in the manual seems to have been rewritten since I did the setup. Anyway, it seems to work now…

ok, I thought let’s setup SpamSieve again (even though it was working with Mail’s junk filtering on), because you do not recommend the junk filtering on. BIG mistake. I exactly followed the instructions in the online manual - ok, it seems to work, too. But I’m back to square one. No “Erase Junk mail” in the menu. Apparently Mail does not recognize the newly created mailbox (“Spam” at location “on my Mac”) as a mailbox that contains spam. The functions under “use this mailbox for…” are all greyed out, too, so I cannot assign that mailbox to spam. Bummer.
I REALLY don’t understand what the problem is. I had my Mail and SpamSieve set up in this way earlier (up to 10.6.8, from which I updated to 10.8), and it always worked.

Do you mean Changing the Name of the Spam Mailbox? The SpamSieve instructions have always said that the mailbox should be named Spam (not Junk) and that Mail’s junk mail filter should be disabled. You can change the name to Junk, but I don’t think that confers any advantage.

To recap:

  1. The “Erase Junk Mail” command only works when Mail’s junk mail filter is on (and not set to “Perform custom actions”). This is a known bug introduced in Mac OS X 10.5.
  2. I recommend turning Mail’s junk mail filter off when using SpamSieve.

So what I’m saying is that there is no good way to use “Erase Junk Mail”. What are you trying to accomplish? The Apple Mail - Discard Spam script provides a similar feature—easy deletion of all the spam messages. (Personally, I just press Command-A (Select All) and then Delete.)

How did you have it set up before? Did you have both Mail’s filter and SpamSieve set to move messages to the Junk mailbox? There are several reasons that I don’t recommend doing this:

  1. Mail’s filter has a tendency to classify good messages as junk.
  2. SpamSieve works best when you correct all the mistakes. It’s difficult to do this properly when you are also running another junk mail filter because there may be spam messages in the Junk mailbox
    that SpamSieve didn’t think were spam.

No, it was not there, but to be honest I forgot exactly where in the manual it was - I had done the setup at least two years ago and since then it had worked flawlessly. I do recall, though, that it was somewhere in an “Extended Customization of Mail” section.

Yes, you are right, but there WAS somewhere in the manual a section describing the setup in Mail’s own “Junk filtering” preference, and I had followed this because Mail wanted to have the spam in the mailbox “Junk”. I remember this because there was a conflicting instruction in the manual that - in my eyes - didn’t make sense, first clicking “Move it to the Junk mailbox”, then “Perform Custom Actions” and configure something under “Advanced”. It was conflicting because checking the “Move” first was, in the very next step, reverted by checking the “Perform Custom Actions”. I had followed that instruction, though, and most probably left Mail’s own junk filtering on. The result was that SpamSieve worked perfectly well AND I had the “Erase Junk” shortcut that I used almost daily.

Maybe I got confused, thinking that it is a problem of the update… As I said, it had worked perfectly well for years before the update. Maybe you can add a note somewhere in the manual that clearly says that this function is NOT working when SpamSieve is configured in the standard way. Perhaps I missed it and it is there already, but just a short note that it is expected not to work would have saved me hours of checking different configuration, rebuilding mailboxes etc.

Yes, the select all/delete procedure is the workaround I use now. But it is nowhere as quick as pressing the shortcut I got used to.

Yes, most probably, because the shortcut worked for years. Which means that Mail’s filtering must have been on.

that perfectly makes sense (although of course the mails sorted there by Mail’s own filter is easily recognized by the Junk flag, which mails sorted there by SpamSieve do not have).

All that said, I nevertheless miss the “Erase Junk Mail” shortcut like crazy. Can something like that be incorporated into the SpamSieve mail bundle, to take care of the mails sorted to the Spam folder by SpamSieve?

Yes, this is the Automatically Deleting Old Spam Messages section of the manual. The section title may be slightly different, but the technique is this same since that section was added to the manual in 2009 (if not before).

That section’s key point is that it allows you to have Mail’s junk mail filter “enabled” (so that the Junk mailbox is visible) without Mail’s junk filter actually filtering any messages. This gets around the problems that I described.

Thanks for the suggestion. Maybe it could go in the Automatically Deleting section. The normal SpamSieve setup doesn’t use the Junk mailbox at all, so that command is not relevant.

SpamSieve normally does set the Junk flag.

How would that be easier than using the “Apple Mail - Discard Spam” script via a keyboard shortcut?

yes, that was the section. In fact, I had configured it exactly as you suggest there, and I had the “erase” shortcut. Strange, but ok.

I do think it is relevant. That’s because people (like me) don’t care whether the mailbox/folder is called “Junk” or “Spam” - they just see that there is an option in the menu that does not work, although it would be exactly what they want. It’s like the “Use this mailbox for…” which sometimes works, and exactly when you’d like to use it, it doesn’t (like, when you have a Mailbox called “Spam”, and you want to tell Mail to use it for Junk, so that the options work). This is just incomprehensible. If there is an option in a menu, it must work, or it must explain why it doesn’t. Just greying options out that actually would make sense is not the way to go. (I’m not blaming you, that’s a problem of Mail, not of SpamSieve!).

Hmmm, not in my hands, though. Can this be configured somewhere and I possibly f*cked something up?

It’s in the menu, and you can do it from there, or use the shortcut. Also, if you forget, you can look up the shortcut in the menu.
Anyway, it’s not so super important. I just though it would be nice to have “my” option back. I can live with a workaround, but prefer not to need to.

Yeah, that is strange. I think you were lucky that the Erase Junk Mail command worked for you; it doesn’t seem to for anyone else that I know of.

Noted, thanks.

It’s on by default, with a hidden preference to turn it off (for troubleshooting purposes). You can click here to make sure it’s on.

That’s why I suggest putting the script in the FastScripts menu, so it appears there and you can assign a shortcut. Perhaps I can add a note to the manual explaining more about how to do this and noting that Erase Junk Mail doesn’t work.

OK this is an old thread, I’m a newbie to Spamsieve.

For years have relied on server side spam and mac mail built in filtering. Have used mac Mail “Erase Junk Mail…” command to delete spam in one step and avoid filling up trash with junk. I dont like to empty trash too often.

Disabling Apple’s Junk mail filtering as per Spamsieve instructions, removes the “Erase Junk Mail…” option.

Seeking workaround’s for using Spamsieve with Mac Mail and a way to quickly and permanently delete spam? Moving to trash and mixing up with good email history is not an option.

I recommend the Apple Mail - Discard Spam script . It will delete all the spams without touching any good messages that are in the trash.

Thank you. Works perfect.

Is my understanding right, that you cannot manually run a script from within Mac mail? (apart from with a rule) Therefore we need to use Fastscripts utility to program a keyboard shortcut to the script.

You can use the system Script menu via the mouse or install FastScripts if you want a keyboard shortcut.