GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 309181
Spam filter does not seem to work
Last modified: 2013-09-10 14:04:09 UTC
Distribution/Version: Ubuntu 1. Install Evolution 2.2.1.1 2. Install SpamAssassin 3. Check mail and look for spam 4. Mark email as spam Expected: spam mail trains spam assassin Actual Result: nothing special happens with spam mail My email account is an IMAP account, spam filtering is turned on in both of the locations. Or in more detail: SpamAssassin is installed. When I mark an email as spam, Evolution shows "Learning Spam" with a percentage progress meter in the task bar (but only showing 0% or 100% for a short time). I can also see the CPU load spiking for a short time. But tailing the log files (/var/log/mail.(log|info)) does not show anything happening. Those files seem to be used as I find lot's of entries where evolution opens connections and checks emails, and also some where evolution trains an email as ham (surprising, does it do that somewhat automatically without user input?). But there is not a single line about learning that something is spam, even though I've marked several messages as spam. Is it actually possible to get spam filtering to work at this time? I tried spam filtering on 3 computers (2x Ubuntu, 1x Gentoo), on none of them it worked. Is there a way to get more information about what evolution is trying to do? "evolution --debug=file" doesn't help.
...if i remember correctly you have to mark at least 200 messages by hand until spamassassin and its bayes algorithm kicks in. so mark messages as junk and try later again... ;-) no, seriously: have you already marked at least 200 messages as spam?
I figured that out, yes. Also it seems you have to mark 200 messages as not junk too, to get spam filtering to work. But my actual problem seems to have been different. I get lots of spam from some stock advertisement company (gnarf) that looks a lot like legitimate email - correct header fields etc., only the HELO is spoofed. So SA classifies it as spam level 0.1 from it's rules (without bayesian filtering). And the default setting is to learn email as "ham" to the bayesian filter if it has a level of 0.1 or below. So all the spam I get is already classified as ham and learned into the bayesian filter, and clicking "Junk" in evolution does not seem to have any effect as the email is already trained - you have to call sa-learn with --forget to retrain messages. Maybe the second thing can be fixed by forcing SA to learn? Also the thing with the 200 emails spam/ham is quite annoying and not very obvious to novice users. At least I thought it would not work at all...
See also bug 311328, 305056, and 272926. Lots of people seem to be finding this inefficient at best.
confirming the bug based on the discussion with partha.
Probably we have to write an alternative to spamassasin. Another plugin.
*** Bug 311328 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
My small contribution to this (big) problem. From a Ubuntu Dapper user perspective, since it's the distribution where I'm using Evolution (2.6.0). - Evolution is the default email tool provided. The User is going to use it. - The User starts tagging spam emails as "Junk". No dialog will tell her that this functionality works after activating Edit > Preferences > Mail Preferences > Junk > "Check incoming mail for junk". (not checked by default, as far as I remember). The emails selected go to Junk, but Evolution never learns. An idea could be to show a dialog advertising this with a checkbox to Don't tell me this again. Unab ling the Junk button until the option is activated in the Preferences would be another solution. The real solution is activating Junk detection by defauiilt (and making sure it works, as the Evolution competitors achieve). - One day The User discovers somehow that SpamAssassin or an alternative plugin needs to be installed. No dialog in the application told her anything about this. I Ubuntu she needs to activate the universe package if it's not activated yet. She needs to install SpamAssassin and dependencies. But by doing this only selected email will go to Junk. Evolution never learns. - The problem is that SpamAssassin is installed but the daemon is not activated by default. You only know this if you open the terminal dialog in Synaptic during the installation and read the messages provided. At least a pop up configuration dialog could have told The User to choose if she wants the daemon on/off. To activate it you need to sudo and edit a text file in /etc/default/spamasssassin. (I know it's a SA problem but let me report it here as part of the frustrating Evo user experience) And I wonder which average user is going to complete this process, specially if coming from Outlook or Thunderbird, where spam detection works out of the box.
Its been a long while since any last activity happened on this one. This should be closed as wont fix?
Closing as incomplete. Junk filtering with Bogofilter works fine in 2.30.