Mail rules work, sometimes

[T Coma]

I've been using Mail.app as long as I've had my 2011 iMac, and although it isn't perfect, I'm used to it, and it has been managing up to 10 accounts well enough.

Recently it has been letting a lot of spam mail through, and inconsistently ignoring certain rules. This comes after no change to preferences, no recent installations, etc. I went through the settings, sniffing around, but haven't found anything out of order. I've dealt with mail difficulties before and successfully, but not these problems. A bit of online searching hasn't really given me much to work with, solution-wise. Has anyone addressed these problems before?


(I use Spark problem-free for some volunteer website management, but I don't know if I want to transfer over the burden of my other personal and business email tasks to Spark – mainly as I'm not particularly well-versed in its abilities.)

 

[Partron22]

Sounds perfectly normal to me.
It's like iTunes losing album art.

 

[T Coma]

Yeah, that's what I figured someone would say. Since I already have Office 365, I transitioned one low-volume account to Outlook to test drive rules / filtering etc. The only thing I'm not looking forward to is moving archives between mail clients.

 

[SDColorado]

I haven't had the issue with it ignoring rules, but have had the Spam issue and having to keep sending email to junk. I tried SpamSieve, but didn't think it was that great either. I prefer using Outlook for my own needs.

 

[T Coma]

UPDATE - While I am using the Outlook from Office 365 for one particularly junkmail-laden account, I have continued using Mail.app for most everything else. Without removing my old mail sorting rules, I have created new rules (just the name of the old rules with the word "New" in front) with the same details. And they work. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So say I had a rule called "coupons" that had an instruction, <From> <contains> "coupons@retailer.com" , <move message> to mailbox: "Coupon folder".

That rule stopped working a few weeks ago. I created a new rule with the identical instructions and that works. Strange. Kind of a PITA to manually copy every instruction though, so I just have been doing it as the mails arrive.

This isn't an MS product though, so it isn't a bug or a defect. It's an Apple product, so it is just a little quirky.

 

[SDColorado]

It's an Apple product, so it is just a little quirky.

That could be. Perhaps the ~/Library/Mail file MessageRules.plist was somehow corrupted?

 

[Trogledyte Mac]

That could be. Perhaps the ~/Library/Mail file MessageRules.plist was somehow corrupted?

Hi,

I have almost a same problem, If I can participate in this topic?

Under Sierra everything worked normally, the junk was separated to the junk box and the important mails to the boxes created by the rules.
That is still happening now, but for some mails including 4 important mails the rule does not work anymore .... it stopped in Mojave.

These 4 mails are now always junk, whatever I may try!
And because these are always seen as junk now, the rules do not work correctly for these mails? So I don't know where the problem starts, junk or rule?

So in short, there are emails that are always seen as junk now and every day I mark them as no junk and the next day they sit back in junk box ....
The real junk seems to work correctly ...
No junk mails are directed always to the junk box
The rules works mostly correct except for the 4 important.
The rule for those emails is box/folder "Work related" > any> From > contains > name.name@name.be
No name for work related contacts is in my contacts, I use the rule from previously received. (I hate to add work related to my private contacts)

This all works very annoying ...

Additional info, I did a complete clean install of Mojave and I did not import anything from backups, all info addresses, names etc. for mail were in the iCloud.
I don't use Smart Mailboxes, only the rule boxes.
Maybe it is better to use Smart Mailboxes for some mails? I never tried to do that...

Kind regards,

 

[SDColorado]

Are these emails that consistently end up in Junk all coming through an iCloud account? Or do you have emails from other accounts also being retrieved by Mail?

It is my understanding with IMAP accounts if mail is marked as Spam by that email service provider, it will be moved to the Spam box by that provider and mimicked in Apple Mail. Nothing you do in Mail will then change that.

For example, if you set up Mail to retrieve mail from a Gmail Account and Gmail is marking a message as Spam and moving it to the Spam box in Gmail, it will be mimicked as Spam every time by Apple Mail.

If the message is from an external account such as Outlook, Gmail, through a web hosting email service, etc. You may want to log directly into these and see if the email messages in question are being filtered as Spam at the server level.

I am no expert by any means, but I had a similar issue with some emails being filtered to Spam on the email service providers end and marking them as "Not Spam" on that end, allowed them to not be mimicked as Spam in Apple Mail.

 

[T Coma]

That could be. Perhaps the ~/Library/Mail file MessageRules.plist was somehow corrupted?

And the solution in that case is, what, delete the file and start fresh?

 

[SDColorado]

And the solution in that case is, what, delete the file and start fresh?

Likely so, you could probably test the theory by renaming to MessageRules.plist_old and start fresh. Unfortunately, it would still require starting fresh.

You could also try the steps here from Apple Support, but it seems as though it was only a temporary fix for him

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/530265

 

[Trogledyte Mac]

Are these emails that consistently end up in Junk all coming through an iCloud account? Or do you have emails from other accounts also being retrieved by Mail?

It is my understanding with IMAP accounts if mail is marked as Spam by that email service provider, it will be moved to the Spam box by that provider and mimicked in Apple Mail. Nothing you do in Mail will then change that.

For example, if you set up Mail to retrieve mail from a Gmail Account and Gmail is marking a message as Spam and moving it to the Spam box in Gmail, it will be mimicked as Spam every time by Apple Mail.

If the message is from an external account such as Outlook, Gmail, through a web hosting email service, etc. You may want to log directly into these and see if the email messages in question are being filtered as Spam at the server level.

I am no expert by any means, but I had a similar issue with some emails being filtered to Spam on the email service providers end and marking them as "Not Spam" on that end, allowed them to not be mimicked as Spam in Apple Mail.

Thank you SDColorado.
The answer is very understandable and helpful!
I have 2 mail accounts, 1 via iCloud and 1 via my internet provider. The emails arrive via my internet provider and are spam ...
I will try to directly see if they are already marked as spam at my provider.
Thanks and kind regards.

Did it and it works! Thank you!

 

[SDColorado]

Thank you SDColorado.
The answer is very understandable and helpful!
I have 2 mail accounts, 1 via iCloud and 1 via my internet provider. The emails arrive via my internet provider and are spam ...
I will try to directly see if they are already marked as spam at my provider.
Thanks and kind regards.

Did it and it works! Thank you!

Awesome! Glad it worked for you. I had a couple that was driving me nuts. No matter how many times I told Apple Mail that they weren't Spam, they kept ending up there and then came upon a post on the Apple Support Forums that suggested looking on the server and making sure they weren't been tagged as Spam there. Sure enough, they were.

 

[Trogledyte Mac]

Awesome! Glad it worked for you. I had a couple that was driving me nuts. No matter how many times I told Apple Mail that they weren't Spam, they kept ending up there and then came upon a post on the Apple Support Forums that suggested looking on the server and making sure they weren't been tagged as Spam there. Sure enough, they were.

Yea here the same, I told my internetprovider that they are no spam.... they promised that they would adjust the algorithm for spam ... but that does not seem to work so well? Later I saw that they put the word "[SPAM]" at the sender-name in the header ... So with this it is now: "name.name @ [SPAM] name.be" as filter and that proves to work for the time being, I hope that it stays that way.

Kind regards.