GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 725199
Selecting Spam category open the first email in the category
Last modified: 2018-10-09 12:26:18 UTC
It could be undesirable for some users to open automatically the first e-mail in the spam category. It's relevant, because if the user wants to delete his spam folder, first he has to select the spam category, and there is no context menu when right clicking the spam folder allowing the massive deletion (right click on the spam folder causes the same as left click).
It's worth noting that Geary only selects messages automatically when you switch folders if you have the "automatically select next message" preference checked. We've got an existing ticket for a way to empty the trash (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=714809). I couldn't find one for trashing/deleting everything in the spam folder, so I created one: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=725260. As far as not automatically selecting messages if you're in spam, to me that feels like we'd be going against the user's explicit preference, so I'm less inclined to implement that. Is there something specific you're afraid of in your spam messages, or do you just generally not want to see them?
I'm not expert in spam, but an email in HTML could contain a link with a unique identifier attached to our address, right? Therefore, if you read this message, it can contact a remote server to confirm that our address is valid, that's not an abandoned mail box, and it can send us lots of new spam...
Yes, HTML mail can contain links with unique identifiers. But unless you go clicking on said links, the evil server won't know you got the message. Note that Geary tries to detect deceptive links in all emails, and will pop up a dialog warning you when you click on one. You should be more worried about HTML mails that use reference remote resources, like images or style sheets. But don't worry too much -- Geary blocks these resources until the user explicitly allows them to be fetched. Personally, I don't see much point in tougher restrictions on the Spam folder. If your spam filter is perfect, you have no reason to look in it. And if it isn't (which will always be the case), then you want the same protections in your inbox, since some spam will end up there.
This usually shouldn't be a problem for the reasons Robert outlines. However if someone has either on purpose or accidentally has hit Always Show Images for a sender that happens to be the sender of an email in the Junk folder, then the spam images may well be loaded. This is possible since the sender is trivially forged — I get spam from myself all the time for example. Displaying a message in the conversation pane informing the user that the contents of the folder are harmful seems like a good idea.
Bump tickets to 0.14 that aren't going to make 0.13.
Marking as a duplicate of Bug 768263 since that will solve this problem properly. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 768263 ***