Evolution throwing away emails for one of my accounts ?

Craig White craigwhite at azapple.com
Mon Mar 16 22:41:41 UTC 2009


On Mon, 2009-03-16 at 22:06 +0000, James Wilkinson wrote:
> 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.
----
I agree that the MX should be discriminating about what it accepts.

Many versions of evolution/Fedora ago, I stopped using junk filtering
because spamassasin was so slow and memory was a terrible issue. I
gather that the response was to implement the bogo-filter instead of
spamassassin at the evolution level to solve that but I do have junk
filtering on my mail server so I just shut it off and have left it off.

Craig




More information about the users mailing list