649622 - the spam filter you are using does not learn

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 320351

(Thunderbird :: Security, defect)

Description

[charles h. tankersley]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101209 PCLinuxOS/1.9.2.13-1pclos2010 (2010) Firefox/3.6.13
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101209 PCLinuxOS/3.1.7-1pclos2010 Thunderbird/3.1.

I use several science and engineering newsletters which includes the US Dept. of Energy and the EPA. For some reason, when I receive these newsletters and reports from DOE and EPA, my Thunderbird, for some reason reports it as a "Possible Scam". Ladies and gentlemen,even for those of you who might be taken in by the Tea Party, believe me, these government agencies  are NOT a scam. I hope the filter can be fixed to realize that our government's agencies are not scams regardless of what one thinks of our elected officials. 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.register with  DOE's EERE
2.receive the e-mail
3.
Actual Results:  
each email has a warning "this e-mail my be a scam" forcing me to click on the "Ignore" button

Expected Results:  
a clean and readable EERE report without any scam indications attached, especailly after once clicking on the "Ignore" button.

The information I receive from the DOE, EERE, EPA, Dept of Ag, and NASA is very important to my and my work with http://chtank.org and, especially, with the CHAPS-SEProjects as listed on the chtank.org website.

Comment 1

[rsx11m]

It's a known issue. Junk filtering and the scam warning are actually two independent systems, and the algorithms used to determine whether or not a message is a possible scam are static and fairly simple.

The current workaround is to switch it off in Edit > Preferences > Security > E-mail Scams until the issue is (hopefully) fixed in a future version.

Comment 2

[tsuchan]

Oh, this is utterly ridiculous, rsx11m.  You're saying you don't like it, which is your opinion; but then that it's a duplicate of bug 320351.  

That discussion has been had on both bugs, it has been decided that they are two different requests.  Is it about stifling a request that you personally don't want, or is it about running a public bug system for people to make requests of an open source program?  All you're doing with this kind of behaviour is making me and no doubt many others think "Ok, I'm out of here... no longer interested in the discussion, no longer interested in the program, let's just go back to Outlook".

Comment 3

[rsx11m]

My personal opinion is irrelevant. What's asked here for is covered in the other bug, i.e., learning or whitelisting that specific sites are producing links which may look like a scam but for which is was determined that they aren't.

It's Mozilla's policy to keep the discussion in a single bug, that's the only reason for combining them.

As said before, switching off the feature by default is bug 623198, but this is not what the bug opener here is asking for.

Comment 4

[tsuchan]

Sorry rsx11m, that was my mistake: you closed Bug 649622 which I had mistaken for bug 623198.

But the reason you gave reinforced the connection to bug 623198, which was close in my mind:
> The current workaround is to switch it off in Edit > Preferences > Security >
> E-mail Scams until the issue is (hopefully) fixed in a future version.

There's no justification to keep a bug workaround for so long and through major versions: what bug 623198 showed is that the functionality is confusing people since 2005.  It's a very very long time to talk with no action.

Comment 5

[rsx11m]

No problem, I figured that you misunderstood something but wasn't sure which part. BTW: I'm mainly a user like yourself helping with QA and throwing in a patch now and then. Flipping the default for that checkbox would be a trivial patch, but I don't see agreement by the developers yet in bug 623198 to do so, thus it may be premature to put up a patch for review. I hope that Bryan, who would be primarily in charge of that decision, gets back to this bug soon.