El Capitan problems with Mail 9 and Spamsieve 2.9.21

Since upgrading to El Capitan I have been having problems with Mail and Spamsieve. I suspect they are Mail problems but thought I should post here because they are interfering with Spamsieve’s functionality.

Immediately after upgrading Mail seemed to be stuck in a mode where it was repeatedly attempting to load a few new emails. The summary information would appear in the message overview column of Mail, but no details would display. Additionally, these same messages would show up in Notification center. The messages would go through cycles of appearing in the overview column, disappearing, and then reappearing. However, I could not send messages. Sent messages would stay queued in the Outbox.

After a bit of googling, I found a beta tester earlier in the summer had cleared a problem by unchecking the Mail account advanced preference “Automatically detect and maintain account settings”. I unchecked that setting and restarted Mail. This seemed to fix my problem, in that Sent messages would flow and I could see the details for the emails which previously were in the Mail overview column but not displaying in the Mail message detail pane.

I wasn’t sure about the setting which I had unchecked and switched it back to being checked and thought things were fine. However, after a while I realized that Spamsieve did not appear to be doing its thing. After a bit of investigation I discovered that some of my Spamsieve related scripts had been altered. They had tests based on Mail account where the Mail account was blank. I set those back to their original values. However, the “Spamsieve - Train as Spam” still was not working. When I would run that command the following would be in the Console log:

2015/10/02 08:32:08.878 Mail[16321]: An exception was thrown during execution of an NSScriptCommand…
2015/10/02 08:32:08.878 Mail[16321]: <MailApp 0x7ffd2db04900> valueForUndefinedKey:]: this class is not key value coding-compliant for the key backgroundThreadCount.
2015/10/02 08:32:08.898 Mail[16321]: An exception was thrown during execution of an NSScriptCommand…
2015/10/02 08:32:08.899 Mail[16321]: <MailApp 0x7ffd2db04900> valueForUndefinedKey:]: this class is not key value coding-compliant for the key backgroundThreadCount.
2015/10/02 08:32:08.915 Mail[16321]: An exception was thrown during execution of an NSScriptCommand…
2015/10/02 08:32:08.915 Mail[16321]: <MailApp 0x7ffd2db04900> valueForUndefinedKey:]: this class is not key value coding-compliant for the key backgroundThreadCount.

Since Mail’s behaviour had been altered before by unchecking “Automatically detect and maintain account settings”, I once again unchecked it. The “Spamsieve - Train as Spam” now appears to be working once again. Although, Console still has these messages, when I invoke that menu item:

2015/10/02 08:47:59.000 Mail[16321]: An exception was thrown during execution of an NSScriptCommand…
2015/10/02 08:47:59.000 Mail[16321]: <MailApp 0x7ffd2db04900> valueForUndefinedKey:]: this class is not key value coding-compliant for the key backgroundThreadCount.
2015/10/02 08:48:52.593 Mail[16321]: An exception was thrown during execution of an NSScriptCommand…
2015/10/02 08:48:52.593 Mail[16321]: <MailApp 0x7ffd2db04900> valueForUndefinedKey:]: this class is not key value coding-compliant for the key backgroundThreadCount.

I’ve also notices that even thought I do not have Junk mail process enabled messages are seeming to have their colours altered. That is items in the Spamsieve folder all seem to be in the Apple’s Junk Mail colour and include “You marked this message as Junk Mail”, even though Apple Mail’s Junk Mail processing is not enabled. That seems to be different than with OS X 10.10. I’m also seeing some similarly junk coloured messages in my Inbox which have not been moved by Spamsieve where I don’t believe I have ever seen that before.

Lastly, when invoking the “Spamsieve - Train as Spam” it now seems slow in actually moving the mail message. I’m on an 8 core Mac Pro which is mostly idle so it’s not for lack of cycles.

Any thoughts comments or suggestions?

This happened for me as well. After about 8 hours, it finally stabilized.

Another customer told me something similar. I found that it helped to disable and then enable the problem account in Mail’s preferences.

Do you mean the rule in Mail’s preferences? Yes, sometimes Mail forgets which account you have selected.

This is normal in the sense that there is a known bug in Mac OS X 10.11 that causes this error. It should be harmless as far as SpamSieve is concerned.

This has been normal for several years.

Please see this page.

Please see this page.

Thanks for the quick response.

In terms of your questions, yes Mail preferences Rules are what were altered by the upgrade. Specifically, forgetting settings for the Mail account which had previously been set in my rules.

I am sending you the Sample output files in an email. Although, I suspect that this is almost certainly an Apple issue.

With respect to my issue with Spamsieve - Train as Spam. The command is now physically moving the file. Although, during that process Mail jumps to CPU utilization close to 200%. I believe unchecking “Automatically detect and maintain account settings” gets it working. Although, I’m uncertain as to what that setting is actually doing and what I am turning off by unchecking it.

Mail is continuing to have reliability problems. Although, quitting and restarting Mail seem to get it working for a while. However, it eventually goes into a mode where new messages will appear in the email summary/overview column, but the details of the message will not display in the message pane. When it is in this mode, it appears that it will generate 9 delivery notifications per email in the Mac OS X notification slide out pane. Once in that mode I quit and restart mail and I will be able to read the messages until the next time it gets in that state.

I’m starting to thing rolling OS X back is the correct course of action.

I suspect so as well. The samples that you sent showed both Mail and SpamSieve idle. So perhaps you recorded the Mail sample right after the CPU use had gone down.

It sounds to me like that setting causes Mail to check an Apple database for how to adjust the ports and security settings for your mail account.