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.
- Check SpamSieve’s Log window to see whether there are Predicted: Spam or Predicted: Good entries for the missing messages. If so, this means that the messages went missing after they were downloaded to the inbox on your Mac and seen by SpamSieve. If not, this means that the messages never made it to your Mac or SpamSieve.
- 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.