My first taste of XFCE…

Well, I gave KDE a whirl, but it’s not ready for me yet, so I thought I might try out XFCE.

This is partially about trying out other desktop environments, and partially trying to get away from GNOME, so there’s a little of both in this entry…

Updates borked: Evolution gone

Today I had some updates waiting, and as is my want, I began the installation. This time, however there was an error message of some sort about not being able to do a complete update. (I did not write down the error at the time, as I was in a bit of a rush).

I briefly noticed that among the packages removed was Evolution and some related packages, but I continued anyway…

Ubuntu Brainstorm

One really nice feature of the Ubuntu community is ubuntu brainstorm, where people can submit ideas to improve Ubuntu for others to vote on.

I like to stop by every so often and look through the ideas and cast my votes. You can even get a graphic to promote a specific idea…

…like the one here, which I was going to create, but a search revealed someone already did – when you get mail in Evolution, a small blinking envelope appears in the panel, but clicking on it just makes it go away! Most other applications open up when you click on their flashing icons.

Such a small thing, but so frustrating because it happens so often! So, check out brainstorm, vote for this idea and any others you like!

Giving up on Thunderbird :(

Darn it all

I’ve had two major problems with the move to Ubuntu on the wife’s box: first, the wireless got all goofed up somehow, and, second, Thunderbird kept crashing when she tried to send email.

Evolution and Spam

Don’t Spam Me, Bro

I’m using Evolution as my e-mail/PIM and am generally happy with it. Of course, Spam is a problem and I get my fair share – so I am currently using Spamassassin, as it can be integrated with Evolution.

This has been working pretty well, save one annoying (and potentially dangerous to me) problem: emails from my boss now go into the junk folder! I don’t know why (other mails from the same email address come through fine), but I can’t keep risking missing an email there.

(A fair bit of spam has been making it through as well, but that’s not as worrying as work-email going to junk.)

Whitelisting

As best I can tell, the simplest solution is to use a manual whitelist, which will automagically approve specified addresses. I set mine to accept “*@mycompanydomain.com”, even though I have only been having problems with one address from that domain.

Also, I was under the vague impression that Spamassassin added headers to the email so you could figure out how the email was classified, but I’m not sure that’s happening.

Also again, I’m not sure I’ve gotten enough email yet to have trained everything that needs to be trained? I might let my junk folder fill up and then try to train it a bit myself.

And also again, bogofilter appears to be another integrate-able option, in case I can’t get acceptable results out of the current set up.

Finally

In any case, I must confess that the spam filtering situation I’m facing now with Evolution/Spamassassin is not as good as what I had happening in Outlook 2003. I honestly can’t remember a false positive in Outlook, and I don’t think as much spam made it through.

That being said, the situation is not that bad, and I have only begun to address the issue. There are many options ahead if the tweaks made today don’t work!