865939 - With trust SpamAssassin enabled, can't keep messages in inbox that are flagged as Spam by SpamAssassin on server but aren't really spam per the user

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Filters, defect)

Description

[George Worley]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:16.0; WUID=e44baded1c92cf712b201676e1a4568c; WTB=3253) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/16.0
Build ID: 20130409194949

Steps to reproduce:

My mail server which uses SpamAssassin to filter spam out of my inbox and places it in  a "spam" folder.   For the most part it is fairly accurate however sometimes there is a false positive.  When there is a false positive, I mark it is not spam and Thunderbird moves it to the Inbox.   Thunderbird is set to trust SpamAssassin.


Actual results:

Mark SpamAssassin (false) positive message as not spam.
SpamAssassin (false) positive message is moved to the INBOX.
SpamAssassin (false) positive message is now moved back to the spam folder as spam.


Expected results:

Mark SpamAssassin (false) positive message as not spam.
SpamAssassin (false) positive message is moved to the INBOX.
SpamAssassin (false) positive message is should stay in the INBOX.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

The problem is of course, in the current implementation, "trust" is all or nothing - a message is either spam, or not spam, according to server's spamassassin

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

As is, I think the report is invalid - working as designed.

bug 660919 would offer part of a workaround

Comment 3

[George Worley]

One should be able to change "SPAM" status regardless of if SpamAssasin or any other "SPAM" software either from an external source or internal source.  A "workaround" should not be a permanent solution.  Messages all time get marked as false positive.  Recently I had to go on my email server and manually edit SpamAssasin headers on a message because it was marked as false positive (from the National Eagle Scout Association.)  As Thunderbird refused to change the spam status no matter what I did.

Comment 4

[LRN]

Please reopen.

Thunderbird has a built-in option "trust junk mail headers set by:" (i.e. it's built into Thunderbird itself, it's not an extension or something), and uses headers (SpamAssassin, in this case) to judge spaminess of a message.

However, Thunderbird also has another feature, "mark as Not Spam", which should mark a message as not being a spam, move it to the Inbox, and stop treating it as spam. That is the decision of the user, and user's will should take priority. When Thunderbird trusts SA headers, overriding user decision and placing a message back into the spam folder, that is terrible UX.

If TB is trusting in headers ("if", because the filter that this option creates filters for things other than headers as well, which sounds fishy to me, especially since the "SPAM" subject prefix is just a default setting, and actual SA instance can be configured to use something else), then it should strip the offending headers from a message when it's marked as not spam. Also the filter has some arcane criteria "Junk Score Origin", which suggests that the author had an intention to avoid this situation, but i'm not sure why this doesn't trigger (and anyway, that filter has two empty fields and it's set to match any of the checks - i suspect that TB filter UI simply doesn't show it correctly).

Either way, this feature doesn't need a workaround, it needs fixing. It might not technically be a bug, just a badly-implemented feature, but that's just splitting hairs.