Evolution terribly unstable

[Lionel Dricot]

Well, I always hear that.

The fact is that I don't know anybody who ever had a spam filtered by
evolution. This include myself, who tried hard with all the
documentation and a few Gnome developpers (that admit it in private
but never on IRC).  Well, I'm maybe to bad ... That's not entirely
true : in one year of running Evolution with SA plugin, it filtered 2
(two) spams. I receive 15-20 spams every day. And I mark them all as
spams !  (this is the proof that the SA plugin was correctly installed
but something else is broken).

And yes, SA was running well because for each mail I reveived, I had
to wait 5 to 10 seconds (wich is pretty huge). On a less than 1Ghz
CPU, the SA plugin is simply useless. It tooks hours every time you
check your emails !

The bug is http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309181 and there
are some dups like #305056.

I saw on #evolution an user complaining about that. The developpers
told him he was working perfectly on his own computer because he had
no spam. Then, he admitted that he was using SA on the server-side of
his mail system !!

The fact is not that there is a bug, even a big bug. Every software
have bugs. The fact is that everytime a user report the bug (and this
bug is reported a lot !), developpers answer : "it's not a bug, it
works". If even a geek like me or a gnome developper (see also the
comment of Luis Villa in the bug) cannot make spam filtering works,
it's a bug.

You can add to this the bug that filtering only work from the inbox
folder (#263621, #309945) and that filtering only work for your two
first IMAP accounts. If you have more than two IMAP accounts, Spam
filtering will not work for the third, the fourth, ... ( #310668,
#306107)

It's a bug that we don't want in Ubuntu. We want Spam filtering
working out of the box when installing Ubuntu (even if it makes a lot
of mistakes at the beginning. An user can understand that and mark as
"nospam" some mails).

Bogofilter plugin, on the other side, is pretty good (and quick, wich
is very important on a desktop).
I was hoping to see it in Dapper as default spam plugin but it's maybe
too late to consider a such major change (and I can understand that).

But that would means that, in Dapper, spam filtering is broken. We
will have to admit it honnestly (and I will personnaly install the
bogofilter plugin on every Dapper I will install) and not answer "it
works" every time an user will complain (as it will happens).


I know that this mail will sound pretty harsh and I'm sorry about
that. I believe we must have an as strong as possible Dapper Drake.
For all those bugs that cannot be fixed, we must admit them and
advertize workarounds and not hide ourself behind a "works for me".

That's how we will gain trust of more and more users : We don't have
super-humans power (seb128 is of course an exception), we will do our
best to fix the bug in the next release but for now, here's the way to
live with the bug.

Sorry for this long mail...


On 5/6/06, Lee Revell <rlrevell at joe-job.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-05-06 at 12:29 +0200, Lionel Dricot wrote:
> > I was expecting this ;-)
> >
> > I filled number of bugs about Evolution for months now. Most of them
> > are in the "nobody cares about" state. There are still 4 or 5 "2.4
> > stopper" bugs opened.  Some are strangely resolved by developpers.
> > Like the unfamous "Spamassassin doesn't work in Evolution" that was
> > closed a few times with comments like "It works. I've seen the code
> > and it must work" or even "It works".
>
> AFAIK spamassassin does work - it's just that you have to train it
> manually (IOW the "Not Junk" button does NOT "learn as ham" as you would
> expect - it can only override Evo/SA's incorrect classification of the
> message)
>
> Lee
>
>
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