SpamSieve suddenly not doing its job

I’ve had SpamSieve installed for months, and it has been working as advertised. Rarely a mistake in sorting spam, and never after I’ve trained it on particular messages. Suddenly a few weeks ago it basically stopped working. Now 90% or more of spam goes into Apple’s “Junk” folder, and it’s often sorted incorrectly. Messages from one particular sender who is in my address book and whitelisted in SpamSieve go to Junk no matter what I do.

Nothing changed on this end. SpamSieve is set up as it always has been. I checked the spam filters on my mail service (Yahoo/ATT) and made sure that no filtering is happening at that level.

I have OS 10.11.5 installed, and SpamSieve 2.9.24. Mail has no rules operating except the one sends everything to SpamSieve.

Please see this page. SpamSieve should be set to use the Spam mailbox, which means that any messages going to the Junk mailbox are because of Mail’s junk filter (It should be off.), other Mail rules (You said you had none.), a server filter (Are you sure it’s off? Is there another account besides Yahoo?), or another computer accessing that account.

Thanks for the quick reply. My primary mail account (gswank2@pacbell.net) is the one causing the trouble. That’s an ATT/Yahoo account, so I guess it passes through Yahoo’s filters. Yahoo provides an opportunity for me to set filters, but none are set.

Looking through this forum its obvious that several people are having the same problem: SpamSieve worked perfectly until suddenly it didn’t with no changes at the user end.

If none are set, that means Yahoo’s junk filter is on. So you will need to turn it off as described here.

It’s not the same problem, just the same symptom: working as expected, then not working as expected. In most cases, including yours, the problem is not actually related to SpamSieve. The most common causes are something changing with the server filtering and Apple Mail’s rules or preferences spontaneously changing.