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Smart Mailboxes: utterly broken

3

3460169

Cancelled
Original poster
Feb 18, 2009
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I have one mail account I use with Mail.app -- my iCloud account that I've had since the days of MobileMe. In Ventura's Mail.app it's impossible to make persistent changes to Smart Mailboxes, meaning if I add/remove/modify any Smart Mailbox configurations and then close and re-open Mail.app, those changes are completely reverted.

For instance:
  • There's one Smart Mailbox there by default called "Today". If I remove this mailbox and close/re-open the app, "Today" is back.
  • If I modify the "Today" mailbox and close/re-open the app, the changes are reverted.
  • If I add a new Smart Mailbox and close/re-open the app, the mailbox is gone.
This is beyond infuriating and happens on both of my Ventura systems, both of which were clean installed (in fact, both were installed in DFU mode via Apple Configurator.app).


Has anyone else encountered this and/or know a workaround? I rely on Smart Mailboxes heavily and they couldn't be any more useless in Ventura. It's appalling.
 
It's not remembering Junk Mail filtering settings either.
  1. Open Mail.app
  2. Open Settings in Mail.app
  3. Go to the Junk Mail tab. We'll assume "Enable Junk Mail Filtering" is unchecked here.
  4. Check it.
  5. Close the Settings pane and Mail.app
  6. Repeat steps 1-3. At step (3), it will be unchecked again.
 
Found a clue here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/zohl62

The SmartMailbox issue (and the Junk Mail prefs issue) seems to have to do with storing Mail preferences in iCloud Drive. For the moment I've:
  1. Disabled my iCloud account in Mail.app
  2. Disabled Mail in iCloud Drive settings
And I've been able to set Junk Mail preferences and Smart Mailbox preferences and have them persist across app restarts.

So on the Macs I will try:
  1. Clean out ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~mail/
  2. Clean out ~/Library/Mail/
  3. Clean out ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/
  4. re-enable Mail in iCloud Drive settings
  5. re-enable iCloud Mail in iCloud settings.
  6. See what happens :)
 
My above Strat didn't work. I wound up back where I started, with Smart Mailboxes and Junk Mail prefs not persisting.

I went back and tried the 6 steps again and left out step 4 because it seems Mail.app is pulling preferences from some bad / incorrect place when Mail is enabled in iCloud Drive settings on the Mac. Lo-and-behold this seems to work: my Smart Mailbox settings are persisting and so are my Junk mail prefs.

Maybe this will help someone else.
I'll be reporting this to Apple as well.
 
Of junk mail has not been checked in the options list, does that mean the email that would've gone into junk will not be seen at all? Or would that Eval then drop into your normal inbox?

Since I setup up my new MBP I've not had a single junk email whereas on my old mbp I was getting several junk snail each day.
 
scouser75 said:
Of junk mail has not been checked in the options list, does that mean the email that would've gone into junk will not be seen at all? Or would that Eval then drop into your normal inbox?

Since I setup up my new MBP I've not had a single junk email whereas on my old mbp I was getting several junk snail each day.
Click to expand...

If Junk mail options aren't enabled in the Mail.app Settings then the Junk Mail filtering just won't be applied to new emails and those emails should remain in your Inbox (or whatever mailbox they might be filtered to if you have other rules set up). However I'm suspicious of this for reasons similar to your own here. I used to have a good amount of junk mail filtered to the Junk mailbox on a regular basis prior to Ventura. Even with the options enabled and persisting now I haven't seen any mail pop into the Junk mailbox. I also haven't seen anything pop into the other mailboxes that should be considered junk. Granted it's been only a couple of days since I was able to get the Junk mail options to stay enabled. I guess we'll see what happens as time goes on.
 
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f00f said:
If Junk mail options aren't enabled in the Mail.app Settings then the Junk Mail filtering just won't be applied to new emails and those emails should remain in your Inbox (or whatever mailbox they might be filtered to if you have other rules set up). However I'm suspicious of this for reasons similar to your own here. I used to have a good amount of junk mail filtered to the Junk mailbox on a regular basis prior to Ventura. Even with the options enabled and persisting now I haven't seen any mail pop into the Junk mailbox. I also haven't seen anything pop into the other mailboxes that should be considered junk. Granted it's been only a couple of days since I was able to get the Junk mail options to stay enabled. I guess we'll see what happens as time goes on.
Click to expand...
So it's not just me being the paranoid person that I am 🤣

I had my first 2 Junk eMails come in this morning. Like you, I'm going to wait and see how this goes.
 
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Reactions: 3460169
3460169 said:
I have one mail account I use with Mail.app -- my iCloud account that I've had since the days of MobileMe. In Ventura's Mail.app it's impossible to make persistent changes to Smart Mailboxes, meaning if I add/remove/modify any Smart Mailbox configurations and then close and re-open Mail.app, those changes are completely reverted.

For instance:
  • There's one Smart Mailbox there by default called "Today". If I remove this mailbox and close/re-open the app, "Today" is back.
  • If I modify the "Today" mailbox and close/re-open the app, the changes are reverted.
  • If I add a new Smart Mailbox and close/re-open the app, the mailbox is gone.
This is beyond infuriating and happens on both of my Ventura systems, both of which were clean installed (in fact, both were installed in DFU mode via Apple Configurator.app).


Has anyone else encountered this and/or know a workaround? I rely on Smart Mailboxes heavily and they couldn't be any more useless in Ventura. It's appalling.
Click to expand...
Running Sequoia here. I found similar in that I had hundreds, literally, of 'Today' smart mailboxes. Deleted them and deleting them made no difference at all. I could add my own, but it would appear at the end of the very very long list of 'Today' mailboxes.

I found the answer at last: by renaming two preference files in ~Library/Mail: SyncedSmartMailboxes.plist and SmartMailboxesLocalProperties.plist so that new ones were generated (safer than deleting, as you can reverse the name change). That has finally worked. Which of the two files made the difference I'm not sure, but the former was 8.7MB and the replacement that the OS created is 5kb.

This had been persisting after multiple macOS upgrades from way back. Only today I got frustrated enough to try and track it down. Thanks to everyone who contributed :)

Guy
 
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