Quarantine SPAM handling

troycarpenter

I’m loving mailcow so far (switched from a very old Kolab server). One question I’m not sure I understand (ok, there’s lots, but this is the one I can’t find an answer for). It’s regarding email that has been marked and filed in the Junk folder.
I understand that moving an email to and from the Junk folder should cause rspamd to learn the email appropriately. But my question is when using the mailcow quarantine interface. If I mark an email and select “Deliver to inbox”, should the email be copied or moved? On the humongous sample of one test, I saw the email delivered to the inbox, but a copy stayed in the Junk folder. Should that have been removed from Junk? Just trying to understand what to expect and tell my users with regards to spam and the quarantine.

luto276

Very good question. Additionally the moved mail from Quarantine seems to be broken. At least if it is a HTML mail. I solved this by moving the still existing mail in the Junk folder to my inbox. But I am not sure if this is working as intended?

troycarpenter

Here’s what I have observed:

The Junk folder is definitely used train mail as SPAM and HAM. When you move an email into the Junk folder, the system learns it as SPAM (as observed via the rspamd status page). Similarly, the system will unlearn an email as SPAM and learn it as HAM if an email is moved out of the Junk folder.
Moving or deleting items out of the Junk folder does not affect the quarantine list. That is, the system doesn’t realize that SPAM has been handled in the Junk folder and remove the item from the quarantine list. As best I can tell, the quarantine list and the Junk folder are not really tied together.
The quarantine page does NOT move emails out of the Junk folder as seems to be implied. When “deliver to inbox” is selected, the email IS learned as HAM and delivered to the Inbox, and while it is deleted from the quarantine list, it is NOT deleted from the Junk folder in the background. The same is true for “Learn as spam and delete”: the system will learn the message as HAM but does not remove the message from the Junk folder.

As I said above, it appears that the quarantine list and Junk folder are different methods to independently handle junk email. That has caused some confusion with my users who think that handling email in one place should affect the other.