Outlook running slow after installing SpamSieve

Hello, first time post for me.

We’ve installed SpamSieve and after a bit of training it’s doing an excellent job of filtering our spam.

Unfortunately Outlook is running very slowly, and is pausing from time to time while we get the spinning rainbow icon while it thinks.

We’ve got 4 IMAP accounts from our own cloud server.

Any help much appreciated.

Thanks.

Outlook 2016 can be very slow to respond to SpamSieve if there are lots of messages in the inbox. I recommend either moving old messages out of the inbox or using the Advanced Setup for Large Inboxes.

Thank you - that’s seems to have done the trick. I’ve archived off some previous years.

I appreciate the quick response.

I have logged this issue with Microsoft support.
I get lots of spinning beach balls especially when I backspace a lot. According to support, there are too many processes running and that too many processes is basically SpamSieve. They suggested that I turn SpamSieve off and see what happens. I will try reducing the size of my inbox as you suggest. However I wonder if the number of items in my blacklist might be a partial cause. There are about 1900 rules and my white list has about 37,000 rules. Yes, I have been using SpamSieve for a long time. I just wonder if I delete the contents of both list and retrain, will that speed things up? Any comments?

No, having that many rules will not noticeably slow down SpamSieve. The process that’s bogged down is almost certainly Outlook itself, as it is taking a long time to find the messages in its inbox. You can either move some messages out of the inbox or set up the InboxSpamSieve folder, which is now recommended as part of the standard setup.

I’ll give it a try.

Michael, Thanks. I have put in the scripts and done what you suggested in the manual. Now for some road testing and I’ll report back. I am running v 16.19 (181001) Bill

And a little bit more. I set up everything as per the instructions and indeed it has speeded Outlook up! Great and thanks. However, I ended up with all these special Inboxes for each IMAP account which is a bit of a pain for iDevices. They were no longer in the composite Outlook inbox. Since I check my IMAP accounts every two minutes and SpamSeive checks for Spam every minute, I added a line to each rule saying to move the messages from the special Inbox for each account to the “normal” inbox. My logic was that all emails in the special Inbox would have been filtered during the period and the remaining emails would be good. There is some pizza spinning but Outlook works so much better than before. Also, all my good emails are now located in the composite Inbox as before and the Spam is caught as Spam for the individual accounts. This seems fine, but what have a done wrong? Regards, Bill

That doesn’t make sense to me because when SpamSieve checks InboxSpamSieve it moves all the good messages back to the regular inbox. So (a) the InboxSpamSieve folders should normally be almost empty and you never need to look at them yourself, and (b) any messages that your rule does move back would be ones that SpamSieve had not looked at yet.

Hmmm. I know. When I ran the script as shown in the manual, the emails stayed there. So I added that little bit at the end and things were where they were supposed to be. I’ll remove that line. Maybe it all glitched and report back. Fingers crossed.

Nope. I took the line of the rule out. Everything stays in the special inbox. I had reinstalled the Outlook scripts, too. And even restarted my Mac. Oh well, could be 10.13 but I have to see if my scanner software (32bit) will work on 10.14. But I am happy now but it is not what SpamSieve should do.

Well, I don’t think that means you need a special rule, but rather that we should figure out why Outlook Filter Mailboxes isn’t moving the messages. I suggest that you go here and enable the debug logging and then search Console for “Outlook Filter Mailboxes” to observe what it’s doing.

OK. Watch this space.

Only error is this:

default 16:23:14.710743 +0100 logger SpamSieve [Outlook Filter Mailboxes] Error: Can’t get name of missing value.

That definitely looks like something happened to interrupt the processing. Please make sure that you have enabled debug logging and restarted Outlook Filter Mailboxes. Then there should be more information logged (e.g. if you leave Console open with the search entered) so the we can figure out what’s causing this error.

I have run this overnight. I have to turned off logging.

What log do you want? How shall I send it to you? thanks. Bill

Please copy and paste the Console log entries that say “Outlook Filter Mailboxes” send send them via e-mail.

Thanks for sending the log. It looks like SpamSieve is looking at the regular Inbox folders rather than InboxSpamSieve. Please make sure that you are running the latest version of Outlook - Filter Mailboxes and that you have Outlook folders named (exactly) “InboxSpamSieve”.

Fixed. I think I added a little be too much text with InboxSpamSieve. Sort of an identifier. Shear stupidity on my part. Sorry I wasted you time. I really am.