Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

VValdo · Feb 2, 2004, 02:50 PM

I don't know if this related to my "rebuilding" my inbox or repairing my permissions or what, but about two days ago my junk mail filter completely stopped working. All emails, junk or not, are not tagged and not moved into the junk folder as they had been for months.

The details:

Panther 10.3.2
Powerbook g4
Mail v1.3.3

What I've tried:

rebuilding the folder
turning junk mail off and back on
verifying the mail .plist's integrity
deleting /Library/Mail/LSMMap2
manually making a "Junk" rule that mimics the automatic junk filter's rules.

so far, nothing has worked. I've done a search through the archives, and see that others have had this problem, but don't see specific instructions for repairing it.

Manually marking messages as junk moves them to the folder.

Any help would be very much appreciated. Thanks in advance,

W

kulverse · Feb 2, 2004, 03:20 PM

Same thing happened to me last week. The only thing I could do is trash my prefs and start from scratch. Now it's fine.

Arkham_c · Feb 2, 2004, 03:45 PM

I think it was that last security update.

VValdo · Feb 2, 2004, 08:40 PM

Hmm.. Alright, I'll give it a try and report back. I hope it isn't necessary though, as it took me a while to get everything set up...

W

kulverse · Feb 4, 2004, 10:49 AM

Bump.

any ideas? mine stopped working again. It wasn't the security update, becaseu I just finally did the update last night.

VValdo · Feb 4, 2004, 04:57 PM

Okay, this is starting to piss me off.

I deleted the preferences and that filter file and completely had to reset everything and the spam filter was working again. I had to retrain it, redownload the week-old mail that was still on the server and all was well.

Then, joy of joys, two days later... it stopped working again!

I believe that it stopped working following a crash. I THINK it's crashing because of "blank" emails that are coming in. I don't know if it's related, but to those who have had similar problems, does this sound familiar?

For now I'll continue to manually delete spam until I hear from someone who might have insight here..

W

kulverse · Feb 4, 2004, 05:21 PM

Originally posted by VValdo:
Okay, this is starting to piss me off.

I deleted the preferences and that filter file and completely had to reset everything and the spam filter was working again. I had to retrain it, redownload the week-old mail that was still on the server and all was well.

Then, joy of joys, two days later... it stopped working again!

I believe that it stopped working following a crash. I THINK it's crashing because of "blank" emails that are coming in. I don't know if it's related, but to those who have had similar problems, does this sound familiar?

For now I'll continue to manually delete spam until I hear from someone who might have insight here..

W

I too have gotten blank emails.

fortepianissimo · Feb 4, 2004, 07:06 PM

Originally posted by kulverse:
I too have gotten blank emails.

If you select the "view message source" menu item, did you see anything weird? Is the message ID malformed? (normal ones are in the form <characters@characters>) Another possibility is malformed attachment, in that case you'll see something like:

Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="--513708415911820253"

but the "boundary" string is probably missing in the content followed.

I asked because I'm suspecting Mail might crap out because of these malformed messages, and maybe, just maybe, someone found out this and kept sending out the "poisoned" emails.

VValdo · Feb 4, 2004, 10:50 PM

okay first off I should say that these blank emails show up as literally a blank line in the folder. There is no sender, recipient, subject, body, or anything else.

When I double-click the message and then do a shift-apple-H to view all the headers, here's what I see (I'm replacing my actual address with "[email protected] so that I don't get email harvested/spammed):

EXAMPLE ONE:

Return-Path: <[email protected]>
Delivered-To: [email protected]
Received: (qmail 67569 invoked from network); 4 Feb 2004 22:33:40 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO ool-44c405c0.dyn.optonline.net) (68.196.5.192) by 0 with SMTP; 4 Feb 2004 22:33:40 -0000
Received: from 140.166.0.105 by 68.196.5.192; Tue, 03 Feb 2004 18:22:45 -0400
Message-Id: <U[20
X-Uidl: -2^"!^m"#!~#L"!X60"!

EXAMPLE TWO:

Return-Path: <[email protected] >
Delivered-To: [email protected]
Received: (qmail 64980 invoked from network); 4 Feb 2004 15:19:22 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO server.doesntmatter.com) (65.29.69.102) by 0 with SMTP; 4 Feb 2004 15:19:22 -0000
Received: (qmail 92800 invoked by uid 89); 4 Feb 2004 15:07:24 -0000
Received: (qmail 92798 invoked by uid 0); 4 Feb 2004 15:07:23 -0000
Received: from modemcable058.29-131-66.mc.videotron.ca (66.131.29.58) by quik.doesntmatter.com with SMTP; 4 Feb 2004 15:07:23 -0000
Received: from 195.120.248.96 by 66.131.29.58; Wed, 04 Feb 2004 14:06:23 -0100
Message-Id: <E[20
X-Uidl: ncM!!?bS"!ZX7"!_7b"!

EXAMPLE THREE:

Return-Path: <[email protected]>
Delivered-To: [email protected]
Received: (qmail 77952 invoked from network); 28 Jan 2004 18:02:05 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO pool-68-237-95-234.ny325.east.verizon.net) (68.237.95.234) by 0 with SMTP; 28 Jan 2004 18:02:05 -0000
Received: from 14.128.240.112 by 68.237.95.234; Tue, 27 Jan 2004 16:54:33 -0100
Message-Id: <Y[20
X-Uidl: RnL!!*@4!!jT*"!="T"!
Status: RO

This is the full content of each letter. There is no further text and each of these are totally blank to Mail.app. Note the lack of any from, subject, or body. I don't recognize any of those Return-Path addresses either. And I think that as I attempted to mark these as junk, the spam filter took a perminent vacation from existence.

I've recieved about 20 of these messages in the last week. No clue as to their origin or purpose.

W

kulverse · Feb 4, 2004, 11:06 PM

I have exactly the same thing happening,

fortepianissimo · Feb 4, 2004, 11:12 PM

Originally posted by VValdo:
okay first off I should say that these blank emails show up as literally a blank line in the folder. There is no sender, recipient, subject, body, or anything else.

When I double-click the message and then do a shift-apple-H to view all the headers, here's what I see (I'm replacing my actual address with "[email protected] so that I don't get email harvested/spammed):

EXAMPLE ONE:

Return-Path: <[email protected]>
Delivered-To: [email protected]
Received: (qmail 67569 invoked from network); 4 Feb 2004 22:33:40 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO ool-44c405c0.dyn.optonline.net) (68.196.5.192) by 0 with SMTP; 4 Feb 2004 22:33:40 -0000
Received: from 140.166.0.105 by 68.196.5.192; Tue, 03 Feb 2004 18:22:45 -0400
Message-Id: <U[20
X-Uidl: -2^"!^m"#!~#L"!X60"!

... (the rest deleted)

Yup the Message-Id of each one of them is malformed. Are these the ones causing Mail.app to crash?

EDIT: ok I saw your reply - so it appears that Mail.app can't tolerate this kind of messages.

I can only think of two purposes of this kind of messages: some spam generating program screwed up, or they're targetting certain mailer.

fortepianissimo · Feb 4, 2004, 11:19 PM

Hm... I just checked my junk mailbox and found several messages with malformed ID. I clicked on Junk/not junk botton several times on them and Mail.app is working fine.

The difference though is I didn't use the built-in filter at all these days (running JunkMatcher all the time to stress test the program). But then I also heard that the latest update seems to fix some Mail's problems. You applied the latest security update right?

VValdo · Feb 5, 2004, 02:27 PM

Yep. I'm 100% up-to-date. I'm updating the bluetooth right now.

Very strange that some of us would have a problem and some wouldn't.

And here's the weird thing... the spam filter seems to be alternately working and not working when it checks the mail. Sometimes I come back and my in box has 40 spams sitting there. Other times the spam is filtered properly.

I think when it stops working again, I'm going to try manually deleting the spam folder (from ~/Library/Mail/) Maybe the problem is somewhere in there.

W

krove · Feb 23, 2004, 10:27 PM

Same activity here: Blank emails, junk mail filters stopped working, and manually marking as junk causes Mail to crash unexpectedly.

Very frustrating. One account gets around a hundred spams a day that Mail used to catch, and now I have to wade through them all. Ugh...

Fonzie · Feb 29, 2004, 04:07 PM

damn my junk mail folder stopped working too today. What sort of preferences files should I delete ? Where are they?

kbdog · Mar 4, 2004, 03:22 PM

I'm experiencing the same problems. Presumably Apple is working on a solution but it is frustrating. Mail is unable to filter junk and crashes if I move junk mail from one mailbox to another.

typoon · Mar 4, 2004, 03:55 PM

Well here is what I did. I shut off the mail filtering relaunched mail. then I set it to training mode. After about a day I reset it back to automatic. I also created new rules as well to filter out other stuff that was getting through. It's funny because I don't have this problem on my Powerbook. Now it works a little too well.

philzilla · May 7, 2004, 06:37 AM

i had all the same things happen as in this thread (i did a quick search first), but i have another Mail oddity as well: junk which gets filtered into the Junk mailbox is marked unread. as i've recently reset the rules, i go to check it out, but there is NOTHING showing in there. WTF? anyone else get this? anyone fixed it?