Spam Messages
SpamSieve does not prevent spammers from sending you spam. This is not possible
to do. However, since SpamSieve protects you from viewing the spam that you
do receive, the spammers will not see their messages get through, so they are
less likely to send you more.
SpamSieve also does not block spam messages from being received by your Mac.
This would be dangerous because if it made a mistake (no filter can be perfect)
you could completely miss a good message.
Instead, what SpamSieve does is make sure that incoming spam messages end up in
your spam mailbox rather than your inbox. No messages are deleted without your
knowledge, so you always have the opportunity to review them.
You can optionally configure SpamSieve so that messages from known spam
senders go directly to the trash rather than to the spam mailbox.
Good Messages
SpamSieve is designed with safety in mind so that, even if there is a bug in
SpamSieve, it will never prevent you from receiving good messages or damage your
local mail store. This follows directly from how SpamSieve works:
- SpamSieve does not communicate with your mail server at all. It does not
need or affect your network connection or change whether your mail client
is online or offline.
- Messages are not received through SpamSieve. It does not sit between
your mail client and mail server. Instead, after your mail client has
downloaded the new messages, it asks SpamSieve which of them are spam and
moves those to the spam mailbox.
- SpamSieve does not read from or write to your mail client’s data store.
Instead, it simply decides whether a message is spam and lets the mail
client itself move the message from the inbox to the spam mailbox. If
SpamSieve thinks that a message is good, it doesn’t touch it at all.
- SpamSieve does not affect how your mail program filters good messages. It
moves the spam message to the spam mailbox, where they stay; the good
messages are processed by your other rules as normal.
- SpamSieve does not touch or even see your sent messages. It only sees the
messages that the mail client specifically sends to it for analysis: new,
unread messages that arrive in the inbox and messages that you manually
train it with.
- Some spam filters make changes to the messages that they process, e.g.
adding subject or headers tags to indicate whether they are spam.
SpamSieve does not modify the messages in any way, so there is no
possibility of it damaging them.
Troubleshooting
If you are missing e-mail messages or seem to not be receiving them, here are
some things to check:
- Because of the design described above, it is impossible for SpamSieve to
cause you to lose messages or to interfere with the connection between
your mail client and mail server. That said, people sometimes want to
“know for sure” that SpamSieve is not the cause of the problem. You can
see this by following the instructions in the Uninstalling SpamSieve
section to temporarily disable SpamSieve or completely remove it.
- Sometimes Mail loses track of messages when moving them from a server
mailbox to a local mailbox. You can work around this by Setting the
Junk Mailbox in Apple Mail.
- Use Web mail or a mail client on another computer or device to check the
contents of your various mailboxes. If the messages show up there but not
on your main Mac, you may need to rebuild your local mail database.
- Make sure that you have not created any rules on your mail server, on
your mail client, or on another computer that delete messages or move
them to the spam mailbox or trash. For example, a rule on one Mac that
moves a message to a local mailbox will make it disappear from other
computers that access the same mail account.
- Make sure that a junk filter on your mail server is not moving or
deleting messages before you see them.
- Make sure that anti-virus software is not interfering. For example, if
you are using Avast Mac Security, make sure that Settings ‣ Mail
Shield Settings ‣ Scan secured connections is unchecked. This can cause
hangs when Apple Mail is receiving messages.
- Try disabling other Mail plug-ins and see if that makes a difference.
- Check SpamSieve’s log to see whether there are Predicted entries
for the missing messages. If so, this means that the messages went
missing after they were downloaded to the inbox on your Mac. If not, this
means that the messages never made it to your Mac.