Mail Version 16.0 has issue with "Entire message" criteria in Smart Mailboxes (selects incorrect mail)

Question

Level 1

69 points

Mail Version 16.0 has issue with "Entire message" criteria in Smart Mailboxes (selects incorrect mail)

Hi there,

Yesterday I updated to to macOS 13.3.1, from 13.3.0. I am pretty sure (but not 100% certain) that this issue wasn't occurring before the update. The update included an update to Mail, which is now Version 16.0 (3731.500.231).

I noticed one of my Smart Mailboxes had a huge amount of email in it that shouldn't be there. This particular SMb has 6 "any" conditions. The two that are causing the problem are those that use the "Entire Message" > "Contains" condition. It seems to be broken.

For example, I have "exampledomain.com.au" in an "Entire Message Contains" condition. If I remove that condition, the SMb will have 634 messages (which is correct). If I add that criteria back in, it will end up with 2036 messages (of which only 634 are correct). Yet none of those ~1500 messages have "exampledomain.com.au" in them.

If I put random text into that condition (e.g. "asdasdsadfsdgsfg") the issues goes away.

If I remove the ".com.au" part of the text, the issue still occurs. So it seems to be the domain name string itself (which is simply a domain belonging to a client). None the ~1500+ additional emails have anything to do with that domain or that string of text.

There is ONE exception I can think of: I appears (I've not checked all ~1500+ of them) the excess / additional emails showing up in the SMb are sent from or to my business email address. That email account on Mail has "webmaster@exampledomain.com.au" set up as an additional email address on it. So that I can send emails via my business email address, as though I am sending from webmaster@exampledomain.com.au. That's the only way in which I can think of there being any association between the extra messages and the string "exampledomain.com.au".

This screenshot shows what I am referring to as "Additional Email address" ...

I have tried creating a new SMb, but same issue occurs. In fact, that's when I figured out which condition was causing the issue. It seems that no matter what I put into the "Entire Message" condition, it will lose the plot.

Is this something I should report to Apple? Or is it fixable?

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 13.3

Posted on May 7, 2023 7:17 PM

Reply

Answer 1

InspiredLife Author

Level 1

69 points

May 7, 2023 7:26 PM in response to InspiredLife

I'll leave the above content intact, along with my theory. Although I've since deleted the additional "webmaster@exampledomain.com" address from the settings of my business email address. And that SMb excess mail issue didn't go away (I restarted Mail, just in case it needed that to reorganise itself).

I can't think of any other association between the troublesome domain string and my business email address, so I have no further ideas on why ~1500 emails from that mailbox are being included. I should also mentioned, in the mailbox of my business account there are 14,000+ emails. So it's not as though it's included all of them in the SMb. But as far as I can tell, it's only emails from that account/mailbox that are wrongly showing up in the Smart Mailbox results.