Message count mis-match when deleting from Spam folder

Greetings! I want to start out by saying that SpamSieve is a wonderful product - has made email a usable tool again for me. Being able to ignore the 92% of my incoming messages that are spam (and that’s after the server-side spam filtration that my ISP provides) is so liberating. (Running at 99.8% accuracy!) Thank you.

Okay, enough sucking up :slight_smile:

I have a question about message counts, specifically related to when I delete messages from my Spam folder. My normal use case is to let the Spam messages collect for a day; I then scan them in the morning when I wake up. At that time I do any necessary training, and then delete all of the “true spam” (Select All, Delete from Mail). On a typical day I will have 80-100 messages in the Spam folder, per the folder message count. What’s confusing for me is that the confirmation dialog box that Mail displays frequently has a different (invariably higher) message count; that confirmation count is quite often >150% of the Spam folder message count. Since I don’t manually delete spam messages during the day, I’m a bit confused about why the counts differ.

My working hypothesis is that this is a timing thing, and that the “invisible” messages are in my Trash folder, but haven’t yet been deleted from the Trash. Does that make sense, or is there something else going on here?

SpamSieve 2.9.23
Mail 8.2 (2104)
MacOS 10.10.5

Thanks for your help!

I’m not sure why the counts differ for you. One possibility is that Mail may be hiding duplicate messages. Do you get different results if you tell it to show duplicates?

Michael–

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. Asserting this setting (and then re-starting Mail) makes no difference in this behavior. Neither did emptying the (mail) Trash folder and erasing deleted items in the Spam folder (undermining my hypothesis). So now I’m stumped.

My current situation is that my Spam folder contains 67 items. When I Select All and click the Erase icon on the toolbar, Mail asks me if I want to erase 130 messages. I have “organize by conversations” off (FWIW). Could there be hidden payloads on some (many) of these mail messages, causing Mail’s count to differ?

–Doug

I looked into this with my own mail and found that the count in the title bar is often lower than in the confirmation sheet. Looking at the contents of the .emlx files in Mail’s data store and seeing which messages are reported as selected via AppleScript (and, thus, imported into EagleFiler), it looks like a simple case of duplicate messages. I guess that the setting to show the duplicates does not fully work.

OK, I will rest easy. On we go!