Strange behaviours

[laugher]

This morning, I started MailWasher and noticed almost all the emails listed were back to its default 0 point non-highlighted colour with a handful green highlights. Prior to this morning, most of the emails coming through were green either due to my training or MailWasher assessing they were safe.

mailwasher.gif (43.93 KiB) Viewed 4570 times

There were also some very obvious spam email that also have their spam weighting reset to 0. For example, the email from loans2companies.com is clearly a big RED spam but its not highlighted and tagged for washing.

How do I begin to troubleshoot why this is occurring?

[rusticdog]

Anything else lost or missing ?
Do you know if you have made any changes under Settings >> Spam Tools >> Learning ?

[laugher]

Nothing else lost that I can tell.

I left the Learning settings alone - Never touched them. I did change the number of lines to parse in the General settings section though but that was on Day 1 of using MailWasher so I doubt that had anything to do with it.

Mailwasher Settings 2.gif (14.14 KiB) Viewed 4559 times

Mailwasher Settings 1.gif (13.49 KiB) Viewed 4559 times

[rusticdog]

So odd. Is there any cleanup software you use ? If the Learning directory or database file was impacted I can see this problem arising.

You can send me some logs, but I suspect it's not going to reveal much.
To do that go Help >> Send Support Logs >> enter a brief note like 'lost learning' >> in the Ticket Number field enter chris >> Send Logs >> reply back once sent.

[laugher]

I have Bitdefender AV and AVG TuneUp running in the background. Let me know which file represents the database and I'll keep an eye on it to see which process tries to touch it apart from Mailwasher. Bitdefender isn't flagging any threats so I doubt its that. AVG TuneUp might be cleaning but I would be surprised it tries to delete a database. Unless the database is stored in a temporary folder.

If you give me the location/filename, I'll retrain MailWasher and set some mousetraps for any other process that tries to touch it.

[rusticdog]

The database mwp.db3 and associated crypto files are within C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Firetrust\MailWasher\cache\

We've had issues in the past with some programs assuming a folder named cache can be cleaned, though that seems unlikely as we'd be hearing more complaints. At a loss to think what else might be happening.

[laugher]

Ok. I've setup monitoring against the file. Its going to tell me if anything changes it outside of the MailWasher process. Will let you know if I catch the fox!

I assume the learning database (db3 and associated dat files) is the only thing storing email weighting values? i.e. I didn't setup a watch over the crypto folder.

So far...Mailwasher is being seen as creating a journal and then merging the changes to db3 and subsequently deleting the journal file.

[rusticdog]

No the crypto directory is used, but a watch on that folder might be a nuisance given it can have heavy activity. The dat files get rebuilt from the database and crypto information each time a message is trained. 10 and 11 files are the ones relevant to Learning.

0001 File - Is a Recycled or Cached Message
0002 File - Is extra message information for quick access
0004 File - Is extra information stored on a message when deleted
0005 File - I forget what this is...
0010 File - Are messages trained as Spam
0011 File - Are messages trained as Good

[laugher]

Ok. Found the culprit. AVG Tuneup.

I was playing with MailWasher and trained it. Closed Mailwasher. Re-opened it. Everyone good. Then...

Started AVG Tuneup. Activated manual maintenance which cleaned all sorts of things it thinks are;

1. Broken registry entries
2. Broken shortcuts
3. System junk

I think AVG Tuneup thinks anything in C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Firetrust\MailWasher\cache\crypto is system junk because it decided to delete the ENTIRE directory. MailWasher was still running at the time so I can tell there aren't any locks on those files. I specifically added .0010 and 00.11 files to the monitor but AVG TuneUp deleted all the files in the crypto directory regardless.

When I closed MailWasher and re-opened it, all email was reset back to 0 spam weighting. I'll report a bug to AVG and get it sorted.

[rusticdog]

Fantastic, thanks for letting us know and following up with AVG.