Junk mail mystery — Nearly every message in Mail.app is being marked as spam | Dafacto
Dafacto

The personal website of Matt Henderson.

Junk mail mystery — Nearly every message in Mail.app is being marked as spam

05 May 2014

As I wrote about in the past, I host my email on a Mac mini with OS X Server, and on which I run Mail.app and SpamSieve together to provide a server-side spam filtering and rules-processing solution. While this setup works great for remote spam filtering and management, it is somehow causing a separate, irritating and confusing problem.Right now, here’s what my inbox looks in Mail.app running locally on my MacBook Air:

As you can see, the problem is that the majority of all my incoming email is being displayed by Mail.app as spam, and I don’t understand how this is happening.

  • Michael Tsai, author of SpamSieve assures me that SpamSieve is not involved.
  • Mail.app running on the Mac Mini has Junk Mail filtering disabled:

  • OS X Server, running on the Mac Mini has Junk Mail filtering disabled:

  • Mail.app running locally on my MacBook Air, does have Junk Mail filtering enabled, but only since recently, as I'd hoped that by training the mail locally, I could solve the problem. It has had no effect at all. (In fact, each of those messages in the screenshot above has been trained several times locally.) And as you can see below, I also have the "Trust junk mail headers" setting disabled locally, just in case somehow the messages are getting header-tagged as junk on the server. Also, disabling junk mail filtering locally has no effect, either.

  • For what it's worth, here's what my inbox looks like in Mail.app on the Mac Mini. The only difference with respect to my local MacBook Air is the MarketCircle email, which is colored brown on the server and colored black locally. But even locally, the junk mail icon is still displayed. So I'm unsure why, locally, Mail.app colors some messages it thinks are spam brown, while others it leaves black—but that's a secondary, minor issue.

It’s terribly annoying to have to press [command][shift]-J on 75% of my incoming mail, marking them as “Not Junk”. But at this point, I am at a complete and total loss as to what could be the cause of this problem.

Enjoy this article? — You can find similar content via the category and tag links below.

Questions or comments? — Feel free to email me using the contact form below, or reach out on Twitter.