Why are Whitelist rules automatically added for a blocked email address?

I’ve been using “Train as Spam” in an attempt to block messages from a shady political group.

My Blocklist has a “From (address) Is Equal to admin@shadydomain.org” rule, but it’s not working.

When I checked my Whitelist, I found dozens of rules that include "@shadydomain.org" addresses. So I deleted all of those rules.

To test this change, I selected one of the shadydomain.org messages in my Inbox and did an “Apply Inbox Rules.” Instead of sending this message to my Spam folder, this resulted in three new Whitelist rules:

Why are Whitelist rules automatically added for a blocked email address?

They’re not. The e-mail address was not blocked. This could be because either:

  1. The blocklist rule was disabled (unchecked), e.g. because you had trained a message from that address as good.
  2. Or “Use SpamSieve blocklist” was unchecked in SpamSieve’s preferences.
  3. Or the message was let through by a filter with higher priority than the blocklist, e.g. because it matched another whitelist rule or your address book.

You should check SpamSieve’s log to see why you test message was classified as good.