Re: [Evolution] Spam in IMAP inbox folder when viewed outside of Evolution.

[Patrick O'Callaghan <poc usb ve>]

On Sat, 2009-01-17 at 23:39 +1100, Nick Jenkins wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I am currently setting up reading IMAP email on my mobile phone, but one
> problem is the mail that I have marked as spam in Evolution. In
> Evolution it's quarantined separately into a "Junk" folder for that IMAP
> account, but when I use the IMAP mobile phone client, all the spam still
> shows as sitting in "inbox", marked as read, and intermingled with all
> the non-spam email. (I'm guessing "Junk" is some kind of virtual folder
> or something?)

You guessed right. Junk is similar to Trash in being a virtual folder,
i.e. a view of a certain group of messages that have been marked in a
specific way. The only difference is that Trash shows messages marked
for deletion, which is a standard IMAP mark that all clients (and the
server) recognize, but since IMAP doesn't have a standard Junk marker
Evo uses some different scheme (labels? I don't know) which only it
seems to recognize.

> Is there some way to make Evolution do something else with the junk?
> E.g. move it somewhere else? (If it matters, this is Evo 2.22.3.1, but
> will upgrade to Evo 2.24.3 very soon).

You can filter on "Status = Junk" and do what you like.

> To solve this, I would go: Edit -> Preferences -> Mail Preferences ->
> Junk -> and tick "Delete Junk messages on exit [every time]", except
> that I presume that this will stop the Junk filtering getting better?

No, the training is done when the message arrives. Of course it stops
you from marking something as Not Junk, and thus training for false
positives, but if you do that before deleting it then no problem.

Most people want to delete their spam every so often, so clearly the
training can't depend on it being kept.

> Normally I like to keep all the spam I receive so that if I ever have to
> retrain a spam filter, I can say "here, this folder, it's all the spam I
> have ever received, so learn that this stuff equals bad".

Instead of deleting it, just move it to a different folder (and don't
forget to expunge).

> Is there some way to keep the spam (maybe move it to local spam folder)
> for filter training purposes, whilst keeping the IMAP folder clean of
> junk, and not reducing the quality / learning of the automatic spam
> filtering?

See above. Moving the spam around has no effect on training. I'm
generalizing here of course, but at least the two common spam filters,
Bogofilter and Spamassassin, keep their own databases. So in fact you
don't really need to keep all your old spam as long as you have a way to
backup the database.

poc