Apple Mail Yosemite - SpamSieve not moving messages

I didn’t see any threads on my specific issue, so here it is. I have been experiencing a persistent problem (change in application behavior) for 3 weeks or more (probably some update from somebody). I first noticed that SpamSieve was no longer moving messages when invoking the CTRL-Command-S key combo. The messages are marked as Spam, and unread messages are marked as read, but the messages remain grayed-out in the active mailbox without moving to the Trash as before. If I switch the view to another mailbox and then return to the previous mailbox, the grayed-out messages are now gone.

I have noticed a similar behavior when invoking Apple Mail’s key combo for Archiving messages, but it’s erratic; sometimes a message is moved to the Archive instantly, sometimes not (generally, the messages that don’t move instantly seem to magically move in minutes, hours or even days). I have 6 active email inboxes, 2 of which are Gmail accounts and the rest are handled by a MediaTemple grid server I maintain. I have not yet been able to define a pattern to the erratic behavior of the Archive action.

I run Mail Act-On and MailTags along with SpamSieve. I have tried disabling both of the Indev plug-ins, and I see the same behavior. All software and plug-ins are fully updated.

Any thoughts on what is going on? I have learned to live with the state of things, but it’s not like it was a month or so ago when everything worked as expected, and it’s kind of a nuisance.

It doesn’t sound like this is related to SpamSieve. If it’s happening for both the MediaTemple and Gmail accounts, it’s probably not a server issue. It might help to rebuild Mail’s database, or it might just be due to a bug in Mail. Which version of Mac OS X are you using?

I rebuilt the database and no joy. However, I have finally figured something out… this behavior seems to only occur when working with Smart Mailboxes. I use Smart Mailboxes almost exclusively now and neglected to test this behavior on real mailboxes. I just test both SpamSieve key combo and Apple Mail Archive key combo on messages in real mailboxes and observed the expected behavior.

I did a quick search, and I am thinking to try rebuilding the Mac’s metadata database as detailed here…

http://www.macissues.com/2015/01/19/fix-smart-folders-not-showing-proper-contents-in-os-x/

It is normal (since Mavericks) for smart mailboxes to be very slow to update. It may speed things up to rebuild the Spotlight index, but they will always be slower than regular mailboxes.

I hear you. It’s just that the behavior now is SO much slower than just a few weeks ago. I know it’s not a SpamSieve thing, so no worries there. We’ll see after the Spotlight rebuild.

Thank you for your time!

Right, I forgot to tell you that I am using 10.10.2, though I think we can see that the issue involves the use of smart mailboxes.