[Spambayes] e-mails in junk suspect folder duplicated

[Tony Meyer]

> I installed Spambayes last week.  I am noticing most
> (but not every) e-mail in junk suspects is duplicated 
> (there are two of the same e-mail with same exact date
> and time).  I am not seeing duplicates in my inbox,
> or in Junk E-mail, and do not remember any duplicates
> before I installed Spambayes.  I have attached the four
> log files that were in my Temp directory, and an
> example of two duplicate e-mails.

For these two emails, at least, I think they are actually two separate (but
almost identical) emails that arrived.  The log indicates this (it has an
entry for each one arriving), and they are almost but not the same: the body
is the same (they certainly look identical), but the headers are not quite
identical (only one has a "MIME-Version" header, and only one has
"Return-Path" and "X-OriginalArrivalTime" headers).  This is a pretty strong
indication that they are separate emails arriving.

This doesn't mean that all of the duplicates are simply multiple copies of
messages that you're receiving, but it looks that way.  The fact that it's
not every email hints at that too, since it really should be all or nothing
if it is SpamBayes that's doing it.

Spam is all about sending in bulk, so I suspect that you've simply ended up
twice on some list and the spammer hasn't taken the time to remove
duplicates.  They end up in the same folder because they're so similar that
the clues will be identical (or nearly so).

> My spambayes version is Outlook Addin Binary
> Version 0.9

You could try updating to the latest version (1.0rc2 right now, should be
1.0 next week) and seeing if that makes any difference (you can just install
the new version over the top of the old one and won't lose any configuration
or training data).  I recall some discussion of possible duplicates some
time ago, but nothing recently, so it's possible that there was a problem
that was fixed (although I don't recall one).  However, as above, I suspect
that this is simply how they're arriving, not something that SpamBayes is
doing.

If this is a very regular occurrence (i.e. every day you have these
duplicates), then you could also try turning SpamBayes off temporarily
(untick the "Enable SpamBayes" box in the SpamBayes Manager dialog).  If you
end up with duplicates in your Inbox, then you know that it's not SpamBayes
(and if you don't, and then enable SpamBayes again and they start up again,
then maybe it is after all, and be sure to let us know).

=Tony Meyer

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