Re: Evolution junk filter not working

["Neilen Marais" <nmarais@snowisp.com>]

Hi Bram

On Sat, 2005-02-26 at 17:43 +0100, Bram Mertens wrote:

> On Sat, 2005-02-26 at 17:45 +0200, Neilen Marais wrote:
> AFAIK Evolution only uses Spamassassin so make sure you have
> Spamassassin installed and configured correctly. (You need a.o. to
> edit /etc/default/spamassassin: change "ENABLED=0" to "ENABLED=1")
> 
> And test it from the CLI (with spamassassin and spamc).

Ah, thanks, it seems I don't have spamassassin installed. Do I really
need to use spamd, or can evolution just call spamassassin?

Anyway, I reckon Evolution should produce a warning if spamassasin can't
be invoked. Silently failing might give people the idea that its spam
filtering just doesn't work too well, as it did me!

> Also SA works with bayesian filtering so there are two possible
> explanations why Evolution (SA in fact) might not recognise the second
> copy as junk.
> 1) SA's bayes db isn't trained enough: you need >200 spam AND >200 ham
> messages before the bayesian filtering takes any effect.
> 2) The message you marked as junk doesn't have enough special
> characteristics to be marked as spam even after training it with an
> identical message. For more in depth info on this you should read the SA
> website and/or subscribe to the great (but very busy) SA mailing list.

My previous experience with bogofilter, also a bayesian filter, showed
me that it's quite effective soon after I have started training it. I
also found that whenever I marked a specific message as junk, it would
be immediately recognised as such. I guess I was expecting it to work
the same.

I assume one trains spamassin for spam by "marking as junk", and
everything else get's trained as ham by default. Or do I have to do
something else?

> > I do have "check incoming for junk" ticked, but not "use external
> > filters" in the options->mail settings->junk configuration tab. How can
> > I make evolution's spam filtering work withou using external filters?
> 
> Why not use the external filters? They increase SA's efficiency
> tremendously!

Iffy net connection, mainly. And I guess the fact that my old bogofilter
setup worked so well, I never considered the need for extra support.

Thanks
Neilen