Junk mail not being identified by spamassassin plugin (daemon is disabled)

[Ben Linker]

Junk mail is never identified in evolution 2.4.1. I have marked possibly hundreds of messages as junk over the past few days since Breezy badger was installed, but not once has the system done it itself. The option is turned on in edit/preferences/mail preferences/junk. It was suggested that I install spamassassin, which I did but this had no effect. I have also checked the option in Evolution mail preferences/Junk to include remote tests, but that made no difference either.

(Not that it is probably relevant, but in desparation I installed Thunderbird, and immediately it correctly identified 95% of the junk mail with no problems)
According to update manager everything is at its latest version

The problem is that the spamassassin package is not installed while the Evolution plugin for it is still enabled and reports no error.

[Daniel Holbach (dholbach)]

Thanks for your bug report. Ben, could you check, if any spamd processes are running, if you receive new mail and it *should* be checked?

Jeroen, please don't 'accept' bugs you're not responsible for. Thanks.

[Lionel Dricot (ploum-deactivatedaccount)]

I confirm that bug.

Most of the time, spamd will not learn and detect successfuly. I don't have a clue why but that's it !

With the new bogofilter plugin, we don't have this problem anymore.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Daniel, do you know about that?

[Daniel Holbach (dholbach)]

I'd recommend turning spamassassin's logging interface on and see what's happening.

[Daniel Holbach (dholbach)]

I was never really content with spamassassin myself (let alone the CPU/memory usage), but it did (to some extent) work for me.

[Lionel Dricot (ploum-deactivatedaccount)]

This bug is more or less solved using the bogofilter plugin instead of the SA one.

I think it can be marked as solved when we will install this plugin by default.

Also, they are two related upstream bugs :
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309181
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309945 can be related too

[Quim Gil (qgil)]

(not sure whether I would need to report here or at https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/evolution/+bug/13341 - choosing here sincde the comments are newer)

I'm using the latest packages in Dapper. Yesterday I asked an Evolution maintainer about Junk not working and we realized that I needed to have SpamAssassin installed. Even after installing it, it would not be activated as default.

From a Ubuntu Dapper user perspective the problem is (IMO) big:

- Evolution is the default email tool provided. I, The User, am going to use it.

- I start tagging spam emails as "Junk". No dialog will tell me that this functionality only works if I activate 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.

- 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. 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 user experience)

And I wonder which average user moving to Ubuntu is going to complete this process, specially if coming from Outlook or Thunderbird, where spam detection works out of the box.

[Carthik Sharma (carthik)]

I can confirm this bug. Using Dapper Latest on Mar 29, 2006.

[Daniel Holbach (dholbach)]

Linked this use case to http://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopTeam/CommonInstallHook - installations of "Recommends" packages is a general problem.

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

In Hardy bogofilter is the default plugin and the package is installed. So this bug only affects users that change to spamassassin *and* override the warning telling them that the spamassassin binaries are not installed.

Should the bug be closed consequently?

[Ken Pratt (kenpratt)]

I am using Hardy Heron (64 bit) and the bogofilter plugin. The plugin is enabled and the binaries are installed. Despite this, Evolution never tags incoming mail on its own. I run an IMAP server that provides header tagging of all incoming email. It almost unerringly places the correct spam indication in the header of the email. I adjusted Evolution to trust those headers - and it still does not move incoming spam to the Junk folder.

Normally, I use procmail to sort tagged messages into suspected and known spam folders. These removes any need to perform these tests using the client. I commented these rules out in order to test Evolutions ability and find that it does not work.

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

I guess your problem is not with spamassassin, but with evolution only. Not the same bug, thus.

[Omer Akram (om26er)]

the upstream comment:
"Closing as incomplete. Junk filtering with Bogofilter works fine in 2.30."

evolution 2.30 is in Maverick