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. This presents a problem if you’re going
to be away from your Mac for a while, e.g. if you’re on a trip and using your
iPhone/iPad or Web mail. With the normal setup, you can leave SpamSieve running
on your Mac at home, and it will clean the spam out of your inbox, but aside
from remote-controlling your Mac there’s no way to train SpamSieve.
The drone setup lets you run SpamSieve on one Mac and train it from other
Macs, PCs, or iPhones. This setup requires Apple Mail, MailMate, or Microsoft Outlook 2011.
Here’s an outline of how it works:
- All the computers check the same IMAP, iCloud, or Exchange account.
- One Mac (the drone) downloads all the messages and filters them with
SpamSieve. The other computers (your notebook Mac, your PC at work, your
iPhone, etc.) are not running SpamSieve, yet they get a spam-free inbox. If
you’re using an iPhone, you may want to turn off push e-mail so that the
phone doesn’t notify you about new messages that would be put into the spam
mailbox, anyway.
- If you’re sitting at the drone, you can train it normally using the
SpamSieve - Train as Good/Spam menu commands.
- If you’re at one of the other computers, you can train it remotely:
- If a spam message gets through, move it to the special
TrainSpam mailbox to train the drone. Periodically, the drone
will train the messages in this mailbox as spam and then move them
to the spam mailbox. (Do not delete uncaught spam messages until
after this has occurred.)
- If a good message ends up in the spam mailbox, move it to the special
TrainGood mailbox to train the drone. Periodically, the drone will
train the messages in this mailbox as good and then move them to the
inbox.
- The Apple Mail drone checks the Train mailboxes whenever a new
message arrives in the inbox. This can even work when your Mac is asleep,
if you are Filtering Spam During Power Nap. The
MailMate and Outlook drones check the Train mailboxes periodically,
according to a schedule that you set. The Mac needs to be logged into
your account, although you can also use other accounts via Fast User
Switching.
To set up the spam filtering drone:
Make sure that all the computers are set to connect to your mail
account via IMAP, iCloud, or Exchange.
Create two additional mailboxes in each mail account: TrainGood and
TrainSpam. (There should not be spaces in the names.)
Note: If you don’t mind (or in fact prefer) having all of your spam go
to one account’s Junk mailbox, you can instead create a single pair of
training mailboxes in that account. However, this may make it more
cumbersome to move messages into the training mailboxes (e.g. from iOS or
Webmail).
Continue following the instructions below for Apple Mail, MailMate, or
Outlook.