Why do good messages keep going to the Junk or Spam mailbox?

This page is excerpted from the SpamSieve manual. For other answers to common questions, see the SpamSieve FAQ. For the most up-to-date information, see the SpamSieve Support page.

Normally, as soon as you train one message as good, SpamSieve will add the message’s sender to its whitelist. This means that SpamSieve will never classify future messages from that sender as spam. Also, by default, SpamSieve will never classify messages from senders in your contacts as spam. Nevertheless, there a several reasons why such messages might keep ending up in the Junk or Spam mailbox:

  1. A junk filter on the server might be classifying the messages as spam. This is especially likely to be the case if the messages are going to a different mailbox than the one that SpamSieve uses. Please see the How should I configure the junk filter on my mail server? section.

  2. Regardless of whether SpamSieve thinks a message is spam, the message can still end up in the Spam
    mailbox if you have created other rules in your mail client that move messages to the Spam mailbox. It is recommended that you disable or delete such rules. Also make sure that your mail client’s built in junk filter is off.

  3. Another computer that accesses your mail account may have rules or a spam filter that are moving the messages.

  4. Your mail client may be moving all incoming messages to the spam mailbox because of a setup problem. Please see the Why is every message going to the Spam mailbox? section.

  5. SpamSieve might have classified the message as spam. You can see whether it has done this by using the Open Log command and looking for a Predicted: Spam
    entry for the message.
    How could this happen? If you subsequently train a message from that sender as spam, SpamSieve will disable the whitelist rule and add a rule to the blocklist. Then SpamSieve will classify messages from that sender as spam until you train another one as good. At that point, there will be rules on both the whitelist and the blocklist, both disabled, so SpamSieve will determine whether messages are spam by looking at their complete contents. If you don’t want it to do this, but to instead treat all the messages from that sender as good, you can add the sender to your address book or find the sender’s rule in the Whitelist window and click the checkbox to re-enable it.

You can contact technical support at spamsieve@c-command.com. Before sending your message, please read the What information should I include when I report a problem? section. Make sure that you’ve included all of the general information, as well as the items requested in the If you have good messages in your Spam mailbox section.