messages marked as spam disappearing even with v2.9.38

Hello,

I’ve been using SpamSieve for a while and it’s functioned perfectly until the macOS update to Catalina (which I do not blame on SpamSieve…).

I updated to version 2.9.38, but I’m still seeing messages automatically marked as spam disappearing completely—I can see them in the log, but they do not appear in my spam folder. I also don’t have any disabled accounts.

Also, I have this machine set up as an Apple Mail drone, and interestingly the remote training still seems to work: if I put an email in the “TrainGood” or “TrainSpam” folders and run the Apple script, the messages are correctly moved to the right place.

Thanks for your time!
Kyle

What type of mail account are you using? Do you have the SpamSieve rule set to move messages to a mailbox on the mail server or under “On My Mac”?

Unfortunately, one of the Mail bugs we’ve seen with Catalina is that rules that move messages (both regular and SpamSieve) sometimes delete the messages instead. Fortunately, this only seems to happen for a fraction of a percent of users, but obviously it’s quite serious for that group. It’s one reason I don’t recommend that people update to Catalina.

One potential workaround is to use a script rule instead of a Move Messages rule.

Or, you could make the SpamSieve rule flag the messages (e.g. with the gray flag) instead of moving them. And then you could easily review all the gray messages in the inbox (by clicking on the expanded flag icon) to delete the spam.

The Catalina bug with disabled accounts (#3 here) only applied to manually training messages as good.

This suggests to me that the script rule will probably work for you, since it moves messages in the same way as the drone.

I use an iCloud IMAP account for organizing my email, and that’s where the Spam, TrainSpam, and TrainGood folders are located. I also have a work Exchange, Gmail IMAP, and ProtonMail IMAP accounts, but use a single Spam folder in the iCloud account. (This worked fine in the past.)

OK, I just set up the script rule and disabled the regular SpamSieve rule (and reactivated the Remote Training and Server Junk Mailbox SpamSieve rules). I’ll keep an eye on the logs and report back.

Thanks!

You may find that it works better to have the regular rule move message to On My Mac or to have separate per-account rules that move to per-account mailboxes. Moving messages cross-account seems to be a common source of issues on Catalina.

Sounds good.

FYI, after moving my Spam mailbox to being On My Mac, I can use the regular SpamSieve rule just fine—messages appear in the Spam mailbox properly.

I do still occasionally see messages marked as spam in my inbox, with copies in the Spam mailbox, but this doesn’t happen consistently. It also happens with other rules that move messages from one account (e.g., Gmail) to an iCloud mailbox.

Thanks for the follow-up. Hopefully Apple will get this fixed soon because, as you say, it also affects regular (non-SpamSieve) Mail rules. Meanwhile, it may help work around the problem to click this link to tell SpamSieve not to update the server junk status for good messages.

Apple has recently fixed some messages-disappearing bugs. Does this problem still occur for you with macOS 10.15.3?

Hi Michael,

I have noticed some improvements in Mail, such as not leaving copies messages that I have a rule to move to a separate folder in the inbox, but I can’t totally say if the disappearing messages bug is gone because I changed my setup to have separate Spam, TrainSpam, and TrainGood folders for each account. I believe that had resolved the issues I was seeing.

Thanks for the update. Do you know whether this improvement happened when you updated to macOS 10.15.3 or to SpamSieve 2.9.39?

I only updated to SpamSieve 2.9.39 today, so I believe it was the macOS 10.15.3 updates that fixed the copied message issue (which was affecting non-spam messages).

The other change I made was that I moved my two move-message rules to the top of the Mail rules list, above the SpamSieve rules, since those are based on sender/subject contents and have a near-zero chance of being spam. At this point I can’t tell which change (rules, or macOS update) fixed the message copying problem, since I was only really focused on resolving the issue.