GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 321788
Spamassassin requirement is not documented
Last modified: 2013-09-10 14:04:44 UTC
In "Edit" -> "Preferences" -> "Mail Prefernces" -> "Junk", it is possible to activate "Check incoming mail for junk" and "include remote tests" even when spamassasin is not installed, and therefore spam filtering doesn't work. The Online help "Stopping Junk Mail (Spam)" doesn't even say spamassassin is required. if spamassassin is not installed, it should be not possible the check these options, OR the "spamassassin requirement" should at least be documented. New users have no way to know that spamassassin is required (applications like thunderbird have there own spam filtering engins, and new evolution users think the same from evolution) and therefore new users think evolution's spam filtering doesn't work. Whilst is does work well when spamassassin is installed.
I forgot to precise that "spamassassin" is well marked as a dependency on some distributions (such as Mandriva 2006) and therefore it would not be a problem on such distro, but some packagers on other distributions do not mark it as a dependency (i.e. Ubuntu hoary 5.04) and ordinary users do not "necessary" guess they need to install it.
the manual for evolution 2.4, section "Stopping Junk Mail (Spam)", says: "Evolution can check for junk mail for you. Evolution uses SpamAssassin with trainable Bayesian filters to perform the spam check." it does NOT say though that in evolution 2.4 you must enable the "sa-plugin" to use it. it does NOT say that it needs 200 messages marked as spam or ham to kick in. also see bug 257091 and bug 309181, those exist because of missing documentation. setting target to 2.5.
i at least added a string about the requirement to the plugin description in the plugin manager in 2.5.5
note that "sa-plugin" has been renamed in later versions. please check.
Evolution 2.8 User Guide is ready with all the necessary inforamtion a user need to know about SpamAssassin. Dependency on SpamAssassin is also clearly documented in it.