spams are marked automatically read

[Juanjo Garcia-Ripoll]

Binary package hint: evolution

Evolution is marking all my mail from all sources as junk. I have deactivated first the "remote tests" feature and even then it still happens.

Furthermore, junk mail ends up tagged with the "read" flag, so I cannot even scan the Junk folder looking for newly arrived mail.

I will gladly provide you with whatever information you need, but this is definitely most annoying and it has lead me to several troubles at work.

Juanjo

[Dennis Kaarsemaker (dennis)]

Don't play with importance please. "It happens to me" does not mean "high priority"

[Juanjo Garcia-Ripoll (worm)]

Yeah, maybe not. But you lose 1000 euros because emails disappear without trace does make it important to me.

[Dennis Kaarsemaker (dennis)]

Marking as junk does not make them disappear without trace...

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for your bug. What version of Ubuntu do you use? Do you use the spamassasin or the bogofilter plugin? Do you use any filter? Is that a new issue? Did it happen after some change from your part or an upgrade?

[Juanjo Garcia-Ripoll (worm)]

Ubuntu: Drapper Drake
Evolution: 2.6.1-0ubuntu7

I just use the Junk facility from Ubuntu. I have not configured spamassasin or bogofilter myself. Well, at least I did not know about bogofilter, but I see that it has been installed and it is version 1.0.1

I updated on the very day of the release. This has happened this week.

The worst thing is that the emails were both marked as junk and as read. That made them disappear "de facto". I do not know if this issue can be tracked by itself.

Another thing is that in our mail server we have a local spam detector, that sets up a header in all emails, with X-Spam-Level: and then a number of asterisks '*'. I have a filter that filters on having '*****' and then "sets junk". However, the emails that disappeared did not have this header.

Today I have restarted evolution. For security reasons I have set up fetchmail so that it copies all my emails to gmail. I will report if this happens again -- so far it has not.

[Juanjo Garcia-Ripoll (worm)]

It is confirmed: when Evolution marks an email as junk according to a filter, it also marks it as read.

I have systematically seen this with several emails that are marked witha X-Spam-Level from our local mailserver.

This behavior was not present before: emails marked as spam by our mailserver were moved to the Junk folder but not marked as read, so that I could verify the filtering.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

is your issue the fact that the mail is moved or marked as read?

[Juanjo Garcia-Ripoll (worm)]

It is the fact that it is marked as read when I have not read it. It makes
it impossible to verify the mail marked as junk.

Juanjo

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Do you still have that problem. Would "evolution mark spams automatically as read" an accurate description of the bug you face?

[Juanjo Garcia-Ripoll (worm)]

An accurate description of it would be "Emails marked automatically as spam by evolution were also marked as read." Unfortunately I have changed job and the machine where this happened is no longer available. I have also stopped using Evolution and have no intention to test it again .. feel free to close this bug.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

That problem is known upstream: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=272027

[Pausanias (pausanias)]

I confirm this bug. Fixing would be greatly appreciated.

[Clemens Wehrmann (cwehrmann)]

Attempted to migrate from kmail (my only non-gnome holdout) on a new installation and badly ran into this bug. The upstream bug has now been open for three and a half years. The workaround mentioned in the upstream buglist does not seem to apply. This makes the "junk" feature useless as I cannot tell which new messages to use to train the junk filter.

As upstream acknowledges the bug, but apparently will neither fix it nor provide a configuration option, I would strongly suggest to disable the Junk feature by default and put a warning next to the checkbox:
  Edit -> Preferences -> Mail preferences -> Junk -> Check incoming messages for junk

The Ubuntu bug is apparently not new with hardy either (2+years). By what criteria is this bug of "low" priority? It makes me feel as if I'm using mail incorrectly... What is the recommended workaround?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

it's low priority because there is some thousand desktop bugs open and this one doesn't prevent a machine to be used, is not a crash and is not security issue, it's an annoyance but now something which is a priority to work on in ubuntu, the bug also has no duplicate which indicates it's not a real annoyance for lot of users

[C de-Avillez (hggdh2)]

Perhaps this can be bypassed by adding a message filter: Junk test for 'message is junk' and and action of ' unset status' read.

I have added such a rule, but I have not been receiving any junk lately (lucky me, and all of that), so I am not sure it will work.

[Clemens Wehrmann (cwehrmann)]

Thanks for the clarification Sebastien and apologies if I came across too strident. When 99% of your email is spam it's tough to do initial training of the filters when you can't find new mail and I can't imagine how others work around this. The bug seems addressed by the patch which upstream has been considering for the last year, which I'm attaching, adapted to the current evolution-2.22.3.1 in hardy. "works for me"

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

do you still get the issue in hardy or intrepid?

[Clemens Wehrmann (cwehrmann)]

Thanks for checking; the patch had applied to hardy (evolution-2.22.3.1 and was working as expected. -- I upgraded to intrepid, which installed evolution-2.24.1-0ubuntu2 and now have the incorrect behavior again. I'll have to see if the patch will apply to the new version... The upstream bug has seen no progress and the patch not yet adopted.

[Mario Manno (manno)]

The patch applies fine to 2.24. I uploaded patched packages to my ppa.
I think upstream is still confused about the bugs description?

[Roman Friesen (krokosjablik)]

I'm using Hardy and Evolution 2.22.3.1 and the problem is still there... It's really annoyance, fixing would be greatly appreciated!!!

> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evolution/+bug/49703/comments/15
This workaround works but none of the common users would come onto this idea.

[Mario Manno (manno)]

With evolution 2.25.92 mails are still moved away silently and hidden in a virtu
al folder called "junk". The junk folder is missing an unread mail count or some other kind of feedback.

I tried to comment upstream, but didn't get a reaction.

[Ken (ken-cook)]

I would like to 'respectfully' add my opinion that this should not be a 'low' priority issue, there seem to be many threads and reports (going back years!) that this is a big problem for many users and in my humble opinion is a strange and annoying behaviour for an e-mail client.

I came to this thread by being directed from here:-

https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evolution/+question/76038

and was somewhat surprised to follow the many threads reporting this problem.

Can anyone tell me if it is ever likely to be resolved or made more user friendly?

[C de-Avillez (hggdh2)]

This bug has been fixed by upstream gnome bug 579550. The fix is already available on Karmic. Marking Fix Released.