Get notifed by SpamSieve if there's an account or folder issue

I’ve been using SS with Apple Mail for about 2 years along with a remote training script app that runs as a drone. The account list is hard coded in the remote training script.

Here’s the problem. Occasionally I might rename an account, add an account, etc but of course I forget to update the remote training script.

Is there any way to do either of the following?

  • Automatically have the remote training script read the account list
  • Have SS inform me via email if there’s a mismatch in an account or a spam folder name

That’s not currently possible, but I’m working on making this better for a future version. You should be able to tell, though, because the messages will collect in the training mailboxes of the account that’s been added or renamed.

Certainly looking forward to these improvements!

BTW, are folder names in the remote training script case sensitive?

They’re intended to be, although it’s possible Mail would be able to find the right folder anyway.

A closely related question, then, is how do I know that SS is working?

For example, as of this morning I’ve not received any spam messages for about 2 days. This is not unheard of since I have aggressive anti-spam measures in place.

But I would really love some sort of “status page” or some way to confirm on a daily basis that yes, it’s working. I could login to the drone and look at the log. But is there a more elegant way?

You can see the server Spam mailbox on all devices, and any messages that SpamSieve caught would be in there.

Let me rephrase my question …

How would I know if SS were misconfigured, resulting in spam emails not being detected?

The spams would be in the inbox instead of the Spam mailbox.

This does not answer my question …

Then I guess I don’t understand your question. Are you trying to differentiate between SpamSieve making mistakes (some spam left in inbox) and not running at all (all spam left in inbox)?

Yes, I want to know if SpamSieve is not running at all due to any sort of problem with configuration, remote training not running, etc.

I think in practice it’s usually enough to observe the effects of it running, i.e. is there spam in the inbox, are the Train mailboxes being emptied. Other than that, you would need to view the log. If you don’t want to do that directly or via screen sharing, one option would be to store the log in a shared folder (e.g. on Dropbox). You can do that by replacing the ~/Library/Logs/SpamSieve folder with an alias or symlink to the folder where you actually want the logs to be stored.

That’s a start. I’m looking for something more automated, so I might have to cook up some AppleScript to do that.