The drone setup refers to running SpamSieve on your Mac when you’re not
actively using the Mac mail client that SpamSieve is configured to work with.
This provides two benefits:
- SpamSieve can clean the spam out of your inbox even when you’re away
from your Mac. Open up your your mail on your iPhone, iPad, or
Windows PC, and—even though it isn’t running SpamSieve—the spam will
be gone. This also works with Mac mail clients that don’t directly
support SpamSieve. For example, if you configure SpamSieve to use Apple
Mail, it can also clean the spam out of your inbox in New Outlook
or Spark.
- You can train SpamSieve while away from your Mac. As described in the
Correct All Mistakes section, you need to tell SpamSieve about
messages that it misclassified so that it can learn from them. Also,
the sooner you correct SpamSieve the better. With the drone setup, you
can promptly train messages from anywhere (a mobile device, Webmail,
another Mac not running SpamSieve, or another mail client on your
SpamSieve Mac) by moving messages to the special TrainSpam or
TrainGood mailbox.
Here’s an outline of how it works:
- All the computers and devices check the same IMAP, Gmail, iCloud, or
Exchange account. (POP accounts are not supported.)
- One Mac (the drone) downloads the messages and filters them with
SpamSieve. Because the messages sync between your devices, when
SpamSieve moves spam messages out of the inbox on your Mac they’ll move
out of the inbox on the other devices, too. You can still use SpamSieve
on this Mac as you normally would and train it using the Train as
Good/Spam menu commands.
- You can train SpamSieve remotely from another computer, an
iPhone, or another device accessing the same mail account:
- If a spam message gets through, don’t delete it. Instead, move it to
the special TrainSpam mailbox. Periodically, the drone will
train the messages in this mailbox as spam and then move them to
the spam mailbox.
- If a good message ends up in the spam mailbox, move it to the
special TrainGood mailbox. Periodically, the drone will train
the messages in this mailbox as good and then move them to the
inbox.
- The drone Mac will only filter and train messages when it’s logged into
your macOS user account. (If you want, the screen can be locked or the
account can be in the background via Fast User Switching.)
The set up a drone using Apple Mail, follow the normal Setting Up Apple
Mail instructions and then enable remote training by selecting the Train
messages in TrainSpam and TrainGood checkbox in the Settings ‣ Apple Mail ‣
Training window. To set up a drone using MailMate or Outlook, please see the
Setting Up a MailMate Drone or Setting Up an Outlook Drone instructions.