[MlMt] Outpoing messages treated as spam

[Bill Cole]

On 8 May 2014, at 13:09, Steve Hodgson wrote:

> Hi
>
> I've recently been experiencing a problem where OUTGOING messages are 
> marked as spam and transferred to my junk mail folder. This appears to 
> be caused by SpamSieve judging by the log information below.
>
> Predicted: Spam (73)
> Subject: Re: PSA Club copy and playground visual
> From: ***redacted****
> Identifier: G8idAYGma0sw81/CApLJCw==
> Reason: P(spam)=0.979[0.500], bias=0.248, fyi(0.000), noun(0.999), 
> agility(0.999), creations(0.002), phoning(0.002), 
> to:@standardlife.com(0.002), club!(0.998), 1658(0.998), glee(0.998), 
> glee(0.998), capoeira(0.998), @gmail.com?(0.998), U:trinity(0.002), 
> in-reply-to:com(0.002), mondays(0.002)
> Date: 2014-05-08 16:30:07 +0000

This kinda looks bad to me, but I'm not a SpamSieve expert. It seems 
like you've (accidentally) trained SpamSieve to see some words as strong 
spam identifiers which probably should not be so. One pitfall of all 
Bayesian spam filters that auto-learn (like SpamSieve) is that they 
learn the wrong lessons from their mistakes if not diligently corrected. 
You may need to do a "training" session for SpamSieve. (not to train 
you, to train its Bayesian database)

> I have a couple of questions:

Probably best asked of the developers & fellow users of SpamSieve (which 
you might find by starting here:  
http://c-command.com/spamsieve/support) but I have some vague and maybe 
wrong answers...

> 1) Why are OUTGOING messages being filtered and how can I suppress 
> this?

SpamSieve is designed to be fed new messages in your Inbox, and MailMate 
defines what that means at 2 levels:

1. MailMate lets you set any one mailbox of an account (a.k.a. "Source") 
to the Mailbox Type "Inbox". All of those are aggregated into MailMate's 
global Inbox.

2. In the MailMate Preferences, SpamSieve is configured in the Security 
tab, where you can tell MailMate send SpamSieve new messages from any 
mailbox you pick.

My *GUESS* is that you've got one of these wrong. Also possible: you're 
CC'ing yourself and the messages are really showing up as new in your 
inbox as a result. This is particularly nasty with the not-really-IMAP 
of GMail because they don't really do distinct mailboxes and you only 
ever have one copy of a message.

>
> 2) When this happens is my message actually being sent.

Almost certainly, since sending mail is done with SMTP and SpamSieve 
only acts on messages after thy have been delivered on the server, 
picked up by MailMate using IMAP (or another client like Mail.app with 
POP3) and passed to SpamSieve as a newly-arrived message. MailMate also 
drops a copy of a sent message into the mailbox you've told it is "Sent 
Messages" for the relevant account, but it does that via IMAP after it 
completes the SMTP sending of the message.

Once upon a time, the complete disconnection between sending and 
receiving email made total sense. Really.