Spamsieve rules disappeared upon upgrade to Sierra

I finally upgraded to Sierra (had to wait for particular app compatibility), and all my Spamsieve rules for 11 Mail accounts in Drone config have simply disappeared. Other rules that existed before (both enabled and disabled), and a rule I’m sure I created after SS was configured remain in their correct enabled/disabled states.

Is there any easy way to restore SS rules without needing to go through the tedious process of recreating them? I presume trying to restore from Time Machine or clone may affect compatibility issues between ElCap and Sierra.

Will I have to go through it again when (if) I upgrade to High Sierra? Not a pleasant experience.

If you make a backup first, you could try restoring the 10.11 file:

/Users/<username>/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Mail/V3/MailData/SyncedRules.plist

to the 10.12 location:

/Users/<username>/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Mail/V4/MailData/SyncedRules.plist

I’m not sure whether that will work, but perhaps it’s worth a try.

I don’t know. Apple Mail is supposed to preserve all the rules when upgrading. It seems to do that for most people, but I always hear from a few who lost some or all of their rules. It’s unfortunate that Mail doesn’t tell you that it’s discarding some rules or why it’s doing so.

Or, if you don’t mind all your spam going to the same mailbox, you could just use a single rule for the drone setup.