Evolution throwing away emails for one of my accounts ?

[James Wilkinson]

Tim wrote:
> That's easy:  Fetch a scad of mail when you have filters set, versus
> fetch a scad of mail when you don't have any filters set.
> 
> Unmolested, they romp into the inbox very quickly.  When filtering puts
> its fingers in, it's far worse than fetching mail over dial-up.

That sort of filtering speed (I’m guessing maybe a couple of seconds per
message on emails generally smaller than, say, 128 KB) makes me suspect
that it’s passing emails through SpamAssassin – it sounds like the right
speed for SpamAssassin, and there’s an evolution-spamassassin package to
enable it.

SpamAssassin is a good anti-spam package, which can be made *very* good
with the right options, but it’s designed around the assumption that a
couple of seconds per email isn’t a big deal. And it isn’t if the
filtering happens while the email is trickling in – it just takes a long
time if you initiate the download and wait for it all to come down.

I would argue that it’s the wrong place to do spam filtering¹, except
that it’s a lot easier for someone unfamiliar with mail processing, the
command line and SpamAssassin to have it Just Work as part of the mail
client.

In any case, it’s not reasonable to blame Evolution for anything other
than its choice of spam filter if it’s the spam filter taking the time.

James.

¹ The *right* place is on the MX, the first computer that receives the
email, which should never accept emails it thinks are spam. But it’s not
always practical for end users to insist on this.

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