Yeah…another dumb idea that is only half baked IMO. I also turned off the “show contact picture” preference in Mail as it just wastes screen space.
OTOH, there are lots of dumb ideas that we scratch our heads over…my main ISP recently switched from Barracuda SPAM filtering to Proxmox (I’m guessing because of cost). When one blacklisted an email address in the former it was never seen again…but in ProxMox blacklisting doesn’t actually just trash them…it just marks them as SPAM (just like they were before being blacklisted) and leaves them in the SPAM inbox. I asked the owners why blacklisting didn’t make them just disappear anymore and their response was “that’s the way ProxMox works and if you want something different you’ll have to set up your own spam filtering system” which seems like poor customer service to me…but we’ve been with them for decades now and too many people might only know that address. I know I could move and fix everything but it isn’t enough of a pain yet to fix…but it is still an upper case Dumb idea.
From bitter experience, if your ISP changes spam filtering, watch out, and be ready to run if they are writing their own spam filter. I went though that last fall with SiteGround and I’m still dealing with the aftereffects. If your mail server starts bouncing mail left and right, the bounces proliferate and some regular correspondents’ servers will drop you off their mailing list.
Now that I’m retired I’m sure I don’t get the volume of email that other users here receive. But I find that SpamSieve catches 99%+ of the email I don’t want to wade through. The false positives are exceedingly rare.
Sherman, good to hear… especially about less emails post retirement! Perhaps it’s my choice of mail app, MailMate but the training of Spamsieve doesn’t seem to be effective. I still get Apple.com emails marked as spam for example and wading through my Spam folder is a weekly task.
I learned the hard way that spam filters can go off the rails and start discarding much of your legitimate email. I don’t know exactly what happened when my web hosting firm decided to built their own spam filter, but what I suspect may have happened is that the spam filter somehow decided that any mail you discard was spam and began flagging it as such. That may seem a logical assumption, but it is not. What makes that a problem is that much of the legitimate email I read and consider important is nonetheless discarded after I read it, like a print daily newspaper. Likewise, I may not need an invoice after I pay it, but I do need to receive the invoice so I can pay it.
Checking your spam filter can be a nuisance, so most of it don’t do it regularly. But most of us also don’t notice if we stop receiving a monthly newsletter, or invoices that are irregular or infrequent, like a yearly invoice from an you have set on autopay. You might think autopay will avoid that problem, but credit cards expire periodically and you may need to manually change the expiration date and security code. Or the spam filter may helpfully design to bounce rejected non-spam email from a client who wants you to do a project for them with a message saying the address is no longer valid. These things happened to me, and it took to identify the problem, repair the damage, and move my email to another server.
So we really don’t want Google, Apple or anybody else to start identifying some class of email as, say, “solicitation,” which we might reasonably assume applied only ads but also turns out to include invoices for things you purchased.
Perhaps it’s my choice of mail app, MailMate but the training of Spamsieve doesn’t seem to be effective
Try starting from scratch and train on good mail as well as on spam. It can make a big difference. SpamSieve is about the only blocker that lets you do this easily in bulk. Most filters will twiddle their weights a bit if you remove wrong blockings from the spam folder, but it’s inefficient compared to proper initial training.
It’s also possible that server side filtering is getting in the way. Spam Sieve can only work on what’s in the inbox, so if the server is sending something directly to spam, that’s where it will stay. Depending on the server, you may or may not be able to turn that off.
I agree…with the additional advice (from SpamSieve’s manual) that once you have shown SpamSieve what “good” messages look like, you can stop training it on good messages. You should treat spam messages like this:
Always train a genuine spam message as “spam” whenever it appears in your Inbox—every single time. If you care to look in the Corpus (the master list of words and fragments that drives the filter, you’ll see that elements of a message are rated from 0 to 1 (1 meaning virtual certainty that the message is spam). Training every spam message as such means that key parts of that message bump up that probability rating.
Deal with messages that are not spam in other ways. For example, if you subscribe to a mailing list, and decide you no longer want it, do not train its messages as spam, because they are not. They’re simply messages you wanted at one time, and you should start in this instance by unsubscribing from the mailing list.
Agreed, and…while I’m not sure about MailMate (@tommy 's client), I know that when I’m using Apple Mail and IMAP, my ISP includes the server-side “Junk Mail” box in the list of what’s visible. I can move things from there into the Inbox and they get noted on the server side’s spam filter. I can also simply delete them, or let the server delete them automatically after 10 days.
The subtlety here is that while SpamSieve works on the Inbox, it can be trained on messages in any mailbox. That can help if you have a Mail filter shuffling messages into different boxes, because SpamSieve can clean that stream before other filters run. So training the results of a previous filtering run will clean up the next run.
[@ace — we may have wandered into another topic here. Maybe a good time to divide the thread?]
I have many years of training in my SpamSieve database. I like MailMate a lot too. At one time it was my daily driver (I’ve since moved back to Apple Mail just because it plays so much better with Apple.) When I was using MailMate/SpamSieve I didn’t notice that it was any less effective than with Apple Mail. I still fire up MailMate from time to time and again it seems as effective. I realize our mail flow and workload might be quite different. For example, I almost never use my iCloud email for personal stuff. I primarily rely on my university email (Outlook) which I forward to my Fastmail account.