Repair broken junk filters in Mail.app

Dec 14, '03 01:53:00AM

Contributed by: iRideSnow

I noticed that lately, my junk mail filtering in Mail app was no longer working -- at least not very well, and perhaps not at all. By "not working," I mean that mail which was obviously junk was not getting moved to my junk mail folder automatically. I had to drag it over by hand.

I thought maybe the spammers were getting smarter (but really, who could believe that?). The weird thing was, it was happening on both of my Macs. After perhaps a week or so of this behavior, one machine wouldn't even allow me to drag junk mail over to the junk mail folder by hand. The Mail app would just crash!

I first tried repairing permissions. That didn't help. So I went to the ~/Library/Mail folder and saw this file called LSMMap2, which I knew had something to do with junk mail. I tried to open it up using SubEthaEdit. What do you know. It crashed as well! Something was obviously not right with this file.

Here's what worked for me:

  1. Make sure Mail is not running.
  2. Rename LSMMap2 to LSMMap2.old.
  3. Restart Mail and it will create a new copy of LSMMap2. In my case, it was was quite a bit larger than the old one. I'm not sure why.
  4. Once you're satisfied that all is well, go ahead and erase the LSMMap2.old file created in step two.
I did the same thing on my other Mac, on which Mail had not (yet) begun crashing, and it is also now correctly processing junk mail again.

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