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So I tried the mail client Evolution for about 10 seconds and it instantly flagged hundreds of my Gmail inbox's emails as spam, even going years back (programming.dev)

submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by Flagstaff@programming.dev to c/linux@lemmy.world

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I just finished bulk-marking them as "not spam" in an attempt to undo the work, and I always check my spam inbox manually anyway, but I just thought this was... interesting, as I've never had anything remotely like this happen before in my life. Does anyone have any idea of how this happened? Why is such a piece of software still allowed in managers?

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[–] Zak@lemmy.world 10 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Why is such a piece of software still allowed in managers?

Linux package repositories are not necessarily curated for software quality. Some are. Some aren't, and that's intentional.

Most of them are going to include Evolution though since it's the official mail app for Gnome. The criticism is more reasonably directed at Evolution itself rather than distribution maintainers. Decent spam filtering with a low out of the box false-positive rate is a reasonable expectation from a "batteries included" mail client.

[–] A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

While you're technically correct I feel the need to add that Evolution is an excellent mail client.

I have never had the problem described by OP, but I have never connected Evolution to a Gmail account either.

Here, I suspect a user setup error involving Google always doing things a little differently, breaking specs, just because they can and to piss the rest of us off. And to hold on to their quasi-monopoly of course.

In other words, Evolution devs/maintainers have the choice of doing it properly for most email providers that follow the IMAP/SMTP specs, or doing it properly for Gmail.

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Interesting. I've used several email clients including Evolution, and I don't think it ever did that on my computer. Idk if that's some recent change or we get different default settings per Linux distro... I think email is supposed to stay just the way it is on the server, unless the user clicks on something. At least that's what I expect my email clients to do per default. Did you check if they've been changed on the server? Maybe that's just a flag within Evolution itself but it didn't really do anything to the stored mails...

[–] Flagstaff@programming.dev 2 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I'm not the tech-savviest in the room, but if you mean by "on the server" in Gmail, they definitely appeared there in the browser as well when they never had been before. I'm not 100% sure it was a result of my Evolution connection but I really don't remember making any other recent email "change" beyond trying this connection.

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Yeah, I don't know much about Evolution's internals either. I've just been using it. If @tom_s@friendica.ambag.es is right, I'd agree. It's a bit unfortunate if software just generously moves things around right from the get go, and with an untrained spam filter. It'd be better if that was opt-in, required a confirmation, or did this to newly incoming mails only.

I mean I have like 3 email clients, two different ones on computers and one on the phone. They can't all be moving mails around and interfere with each other. I do the spam filtering and sorting on the server and keep the clients as simple as possible.

[–] A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

I've used Evolution for years and couldn't be happier.

AFAIU it does not apply any heuristics but only checks if my email provider has marked messages as junk, plus what I manually mark as junk.

I almost never find a valid mail in the junk folder.

I suspect something went wrong in your initial setup, or you had some ambiguous/invalid IMAP settings in Gmail. And I'm going to guess that switching from Gmail's webmail to a proper email client can be daunting, because Google always likes to do things a little differently, often esp. to piss people like you off and keep them in their grip.

These are the only junk-related settings I have:

[–] Flagstaff@programming.dev 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I never even checked the settings, though; I just happened to notice the spam move shortly after launching. Actually, I think I didn't even do any connection; it just immediately piggybacked off my existing GNOME calendar Google integration. I guess I'm misunderstanding something but I really don't know what went wrong.

[–] A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip 0 points 2 weeks ago

Google really, really wants users to use their own products. Maybe there's some boneheaded OSS devs behind this, but there's definitely an evil corporation behind this.

[–] MasterBlaster@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago

I can't speak about Evolution specifically, but I know Thunderbird has a built in filter and instructions state it learns based on your choices. Thus it flags many messages as possible spam, and you as the user can correct that "guess", which helps train it. It does not automatically sweep those guesses into the spam folder.

[–] comrademiao@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago

wow that client looks ugly compared to thunderbird