I've Had It With Mail.app!!!

Man - I am having more problems with Leopard Mail than with Tiger Mail! My problem is that I have Mail.app configured as a SS drone.
My issue with Apple Mail (I’ll just call it Mail) is that it doesn’t reliably check my email provider for new messages, so how is SS supposed to effectively do its job? It really only checks email reliably if I’m interacting in some way with Mail (ironically, clicking the ‘Get Mail’ button, or otherwise trying to make it check email more often than not does NOTHING). The IMAP IDLE option in Mail seems not to do anything…

On the bright side, IMAP IDLE in Thunderbird 2.0.0.9 seems to work as expected with my mail server (that’s why I think there’s something wrong with Mail)!

Now, since I have Mail configured as a SS drone and I cannot (I believe) do the same thing with Thunderbird, do I have any options here? I mean, if my computer at home (the drone) is simply set to check email more frequently than my other computers and iPhone, would that give SS the opportunity to trap the spam and put it somewhere that my other email clients won’t ever see (like a local folder), and what’s the difference between doing that and my drone setup?
What am I losing?

I’m figuring that since Thunderbird’s implementation of IMAP IDLE is working with my email provider, than Thunderbird will almost always receive the email before my other devices (which are using Mail), and so those devices should effectively reap the benefits of SS filtering, right?

Am I missing something? Relying on Mail.app for a drone has become downright depressing, as I think SS is a stellar application, being rendered next to useless because of its host.

Thanks - any help is appreciated!

CJ

Sorry to hear that—I’ve never had (or heard of) such a problem with Mail. Is Mail reporting any errors in the Console?

The drone setup does not work with Thunderbird.

The difference is that the drone setup allows you to train SpamSieve from another computer or iPhone by moving messages into the special training mailboxes. Without the drone setup, the spam messages can still be removed from the inbox on the server, but the training must be done from the Mac running SpamSieve. Also, due to limitations of Thunderbird, the SpamSieve’s accuracy will be better with Mail.

Probably.

Honestly, at this point, reduced accuracy is better than almost no accuracy. Can you even attempt to quantify just how much less the accuracy would be? I mean, it is so accurate right now that I could probably tolerate a reduction. I’ll even deal with local-only training right now, because with Maill.app, it’s way too much management!

CJ

Quantify, no. The basic issue is that Thunderbird doesn’t let SpamSieve see the contents of the attachments. This mostly matters for messages that have very little content other than the attachments. And, yes, I agree that this makes little difference compared to almost no accuracy. :slight_smile:

Install GyazMail? SpamSieve works great with GyazMail and it has a lot more (decent) features then AppleMail… :slight_smile: