Rescan folder and reevaluate messages for spam

Hi,

I have SpamSieve setup correctly, everything was working fine. Today I changed my rules to allow SpamSieve to use the color flags with Apple Mail. Everthing seemed to be working great. And then I hit a stupid button (“Apply Rules”) in my spam folder. Now all my messages lost their colors. SpamSieve only evaluates incoming messages. Is there any way to get SpamSieve to rescan a folder and rerun it’s evaluations and scoring (thus apply the flag color rules)?

Thanks

Yes, you can select the messages and choose Apply Rules from the Message menu.

OK. I think I found what the issue is. I’m using this, I found that under Preferences -> Junk Mail there’s a checkbox “Filter junk mail before applying my rules”. Should this be on or off? I have a feeling off. But let me know.

Thanks

I wouldn’t expect that to matter if everything else is set up properly. But there’s no harm in having it off.

Michael, is Apply Rules still the way to go? I just found that fewer than 1% (16) of the messages in a single mailbox (1963) were moved out. (I returned home after a two-week vacation to find that power had gone off and the machine didn’t restart properly when the power came back on.)

Yes. For a large number of messages, you should also temporarily turn off auto-training before using Apply Rules.

Okay, I communicated that badly. I tried Apply Rules, but only a few (16) of the spam messages (probably 1800) were moved to Spam. I tried once again with Auto Training off; SS worked for about two minutes, then stopped with no additional messages moved.

That’s probably because you already did it with auto-training on, which means that all the ones that didn’t move the first time are now on the whitelist. You could try deleting the recently added rules from the Whitelist rule and then Apply Rules again. It might also help to do smaller batches, as I’ve seen Mail sometimes get overloaded applying rules to many at once.

Great, I’ll do that. (3000 recently-created whitelist rules.)