ericmurphy
Registered
I have three Macs (G5, G4, G3 iMac) all running the most recent, fully-patched version of OX X 10.4. All three machines are synchronized using .Mac sync, and I have the same account on all three machines.
About a month ago, two of the machines' junk filters simultaneously stopped working entirely (IIRC, this was after I had to reset .mac syncing due to some inconsistency). In other words, Mail on both machines was failing to identify any mail as junk. I tried resetting the junk filters on both machines, put them in training mode, trained them over several hundred junk mail messages, to no avail. Neither machine was flagging any mail whatsoever as junk.
Last night, as an experiment, I copied the file ~/library/com.apple.mail.plist from the machine (the G5) that was still filtering mail properly to the iMac (Mail wasn't running on either machine at the time I did the copy). Unfortunately, this fix seemed to have no effect, and worse, after the next sync, the one working machine no longer filtered mail properly! So now none of the three machines is filtering junk. But at least it seems clear that com.apple.mail.plist is in fact the file responsible for junk filtering, despite its small size (~16k). And all other filters (I use about 20 filters) seem to be working properly.
And, to make matters even worse, I restored the aforementioned file from yesterday's backup (you have no idea how anal I am about backups; most days I get three complete backups of my home directory), but that didn't help either! It seems like whatever caused the problem in the first two machines has spread to the one remaining machine, and now I can't even restore things to the (sort of barely functional) state they were in yesterday, before I replaced the bad preference files with what I thought was a working version of the mail preferences file.
Anyone have any ideas how to remedy this lamentable situation?
About a month ago, two of the machines' junk filters simultaneously stopped working entirely (IIRC, this was after I had to reset .mac syncing due to some inconsistency). In other words, Mail on both machines was failing to identify any mail as junk. I tried resetting the junk filters on both machines, put them in training mode, trained them over several hundred junk mail messages, to no avail. Neither machine was flagging any mail whatsoever as junk.
Last night, as an experiment, I copied the file ~/library/com.apple.mail.plist from the machine (the G5) that was still filtering mail properly to the iMac (Mail wasn't running on either machine at the time I did the copy). Unfortunately, this fix seemed to have no effect, and worse, after the next sync, the one working machine no longer filtered mail properly! So now none of the three machines is filtering junk. But at least it seems clear that com.apple.mail.plist is in fact the file responsible for junk filtering, despite its small size (~16k). And all other filters (I use about 20 filters) seem to be working properly.
And, to make matters even worse, I restored the aforementioned file from yesterday's backup (you have no idea how anal I am about backups; most days I get three complete backups of my home directory), but that didn't help either! It seems like whatever caused the problem in the first two machines has spread to the one remaining machine, and now I can't even restore things to the (sort of barely functional) state they were in yesterday, before I replaced the bad preference files with what I thought was a working version of the mail preferences file.
Anyone have any ideas how to remedy this lamentable situation?