Spam marked good in Outlook 365 disappears, found online and is a fiddle to get back.

Hi,
I am running Outlook 2016 on Mojave. I have set everything up the way it is supposed to be. Even have discussed with Michael.

All is well except when an email comes in as Spam and is moved to the Spam folder. If you use the scripts to say it isn’t Spam, it is moved to the Outlook Inbox for a little while and then it disappears. In this case, I used BT/Yahoo email. I can find it online in the account. My guess is the action of clicking on the email turns it from unread to read and then it disappears from the Outlook in box because Outlook no longer recognises it as new email.

I could be wrong, but might there be something in the script that is ‘confusing’ Outlook? I know there a pages in the Frequently Asked Questions about this happening in Apple Mail but what is one supposed to do with Outlook 365?

The only work around is to log into my BT account and mark the email as unread. Then it appears in the InboxSpamSieve online and in Outlook and then finally back in the Inbox where it was before.

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but it is driving be nuts!

Cheers,

Bill

Do you have Outlook set to use the Focused Inbox?

Have you checked for the message in the InboxSpamSieve folder?

Does “online” refer to Webmail or to something else? Which mailbox do you see the message in there?

What makes you think that Outlook would move read messages or not show them in the inbox? Is that how it normally works for you?

If you see the message move back to the inbox, the script’s work is already done. It sounds like something is happening after that.

If you are referring to this page, it applies to all e-mail clients. Do you think the multi-Mac issue could apply to your case?

The other issue mentioned is Apple Mail database corruption. I’ve not seen that to be anywhere near as much of a problem with Outlook, and I don’t think Outlook provides a way to rebuild its database, although you could certainly delete everything an start over.

A little bit more.
I’ll try my best on this one.
I have looked in all folders. I this case, there were only 6 so it was easy enough to see. It was not in InboxSpamSieve.
Online is in Safari. The email eventually appeared in the Inbox in Safari but not in the Inbox in Outlook.
Outlook does not move ‘read’ messages from Safari to the Outlook Inbox. After I marked the message as unread in the Safari Inbox, it was re-processed by SpamSieve as a new email (well that is what I think) and appeared in the InboxSpamSieve both in Safari and in Outlook. It then moved yo the Outlook Inbox. I should point out, that by locating the read message in the Safari Inbox (prior to marking it unread), i was able to write the email address to my Outlook Contacts and add that email address to SpamSieve in preferences. Therefore, any email from that person would not be Spam, by definition. It was based on this, that I finally got the email into Outlook and I could reply to it in Outlook.
I don’t have a Multi-Mac issue. I do use an iPhone but I hadn’t touched the Apple Email client.

Do you think that it could be an Outlook issue? It is my understanding that MS are pushing for Server-side Spam checking. That would mean that BT/Yahoo, Gmail etc would have to have their own server side spam filtering system.

I hope this made some sense. I don’t mind if these emails disappear occasionally as long as they come back soon. In this case, it was gone for over 10 minutes and it was a financial email.

Funnily, about 30 to 40 minutes later, another copy fo the email appeared in the Outlook email Inbox.

FYI: Safari means I have logged into my Email via a browser. Outlook means I have the Outlook 2016 (365) client on my Mac on Mojave.

Hope that made sense.

Regards,

Bill

It sounds like your Outlook rule moved the message from Inbox to InboxSpamSieve (unless you have configured a server rule that does that). SpamSieve only processes messages that are in InboxSpamSieve.

Training the message as good will automatically whitelist the message in SpamSieve.

Perhaps—it sounds like Outlook successfully moved the message to the inbox but then lost track of it. I’ve not heard of that happening before.

Does the same thing happen if you drag and drop a message to the inbox?

One possible workaround would be to click this link. This will prevent SpamSieve from asking Outlook to move good messages when you train them.

May be the case but I the messages was only moved from the web Inbox after I marked it as unread.

That is good and what I assumed happened. But that is when the message disappeared completely. I am not the only person to whom this happens. My partner has exactly the same issue on another BT account on a separate Mac. It is driving her crazy.

I will agree with you. Perhaps there are syncing issues with Outlook but if you look Syncing Error in Outlook in the Tools Tab, there are no errors.

I haven’t tried that and will when the next Spam message arrives. I’ll report back. So I will be dragging an unread Junk message to my Inbox and then see what happens?

I have clicked the link and will see what happens.

One more question about this. Outlook defaults to “Bulk Mail” for Junk. Should these folder names be used instead of Junk or Spam or whatever. What folder name is SpamSieve looking for when it moves junk?

Perhaps there is a bug where Outlook’s rules are treating the message as new if it’s unread, even though it saw that message before. It is interesting that both you and your partner are seeing this but no one else has ever mentioned it.

After using the link that I mentioned, training won’t move the message, so it should prevent that issue.

Which version of Outlook are you using? Does the problem only occur for Yahoo or also for other mail providers?

Yes, but you would only do this for good messages in the Junk mailbox (after training them as good).

I’m not sure what you mean by “defaults” here. From what I’ve seen, Outlook uses the special icon for the Junk mailbox. Some mail providers (like Yahoo) offer a Bulk mailbox in addition to Spam/Junk. This is for a different class of messages that are bulk but good.

I don’t think so.

SpamSieve does not look by name. It asks Outlook for the special mailbox that is to be used for junk mail.

Such is life I guess.
The only rules in Outlook are the SpamSieve ones so whatever is happening within Outlook is not visible to me. I have discussed this with MS support forever. Just don’t know any more.

That is fixed. After I have set the message as good, it stays there. Interestingly, that email address that SpamSieve interpreted to be Spam shows up in my White List with a date of May-2013. And I received two copies of the same message, each one was sent to a separate email address. One I set at not spam and moved it to the inbox for that message (in Outlook). The message was eventually moved by SpamSieve to InboxSpamSieve and appeared twice in the Inbox. That was quick. In the other email account, I manually moved (the same) message to its Inbox. It completely disappeared but eventually showed up some time later.

Outlook 2016 (181118). Not sure it it occurs with other email providers. Might with Compuserve but I get so little email with them that I can’t remember clearly. Of course SpamSieve doesn’t really work with an exchange server but that is OK because I get even less mail on that than I do with Compuserve.

Fine

Fine

OK
I don’t really think we are getting any where but that is not your problem. thanks for all of your suggestions. Bill

Perhaps this is because the whitelist rule was disabled (because you had previously trained a message from that address as spam).

That seems to be a beta version of Outlook (16.20). It looks like the current release version is 16.19/18110915.

That’s true. It is the fast insider, rather than the slow insider, rather than the stable release. But we worked our way up to the fast insider seeing whether any of them would fix the missing emails. I’ll raise this with MS support but as I have mentioned, they don’t understand SpamSieve. I’ve sent them all the links to your stuff and was thanked. However, MS are heading toward server-side spam filtering. That isn’t fun. Actually the issues around this only surfaced when MS dropped support for Apple Script.

As I said, I don’t think we are going very far with this (not your fault or my fault). I just want to live with it and understand what is happening. I am getting close to the former.

Bill

If you want to simplify it for them, you could just say that you have an AppleScript that moves the message from Junk to Inbox. That seems to be where the problem is happening, anyway, and it’s not specific to SpamSieve.

Michael, That’s great. I’ll let you know what happens. Thanks for all of your help. Regards, Bill