Too eager spam filtering with limited evidence

[era]

Binary package hint: thunderbird

When you first take the junk email filter into use, it is much too eager to classify messages as spam. If you also check the "automatically move to junk folder" or a related option, you are unlikely to notice all the false positives.

I have not yet tried these repro steps, but I think they should work.

1. Be the owner of an mailbox which receives a fair amount of spam.
2. Create a new account for this mailbox (same settings as an existing account is fine, I believe).
3. Open the mailbox and click the junk email symbol on a few spam messages.
4. Exit Thunderbird.
5. Wait for some mail to arrive.
6. Reopen Thunderbird and visit the account again. Run junk email controls.

Expected outcome:

Because there is only very scant evidence to draw from, it should not yet mark any messages as spam.

This is how e.g. SpamAssassin works; it refuses to use the Bayesian feature until it is adequately trained (where "adequately" is simply defined as having learned from a fixed minimum number of both spam and ham samples; the default threshold is 200 each).

Actual outcome:

Lots of false positives.

vnix$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 8.10
Release: 8.10

vnix$ apt-cache policy thunderbird
thunderbird:
  Installed: 2.0.0.18+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.8.10.1
  Candidate: 2.0.0.18+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.8.10.1
  Version table:
 *** 2.0.0.18+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.8.10.1 0
        500 http://security.ubuntu.com intrepid-security/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     2.0.0.17+nobinonly-0ubuntu1 0
        500 http://fi.archive.ubuntu.com intrepid/main Packages

[gf (gf-interlinks-deactivatedaccount)]

Hello Era.
Thanks for submitting this bug and reporting a problem with Thunderbird.

You made this bug report in 2008 regarding Thunderbird and there have been several versions of Thunderbird since then.

Could you confirm that this is no longer a problem and that we can close the ticket? Or, if it is still a problem, could you come to Launchpad and make a comment to that effect?

Thank you again for helping make Ubuntu and Thunderbird better.

G

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for thunderbird (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]