Abstract In this paper, we introduce a four-filtrated version of the May spectral sequence (MSS), from which we study the general properties of the spectral sequence and give a collapse theorem. We also give an efficient method to detect generators of May E1-term E s,t,b,∗ 1 for a given (s, t, b, ∗). As an application, we give a method to prove the non-triviality of some compositions of the kno...