I just finished bulk-marking them as “not spam” in an attempt to undo the work, and I always check my spam inbox manually anyway, but I just thought this was… interesting, as I’ve never had anything remotely like this happen before in my life. Does anyone have any idea of how this happened? Why is such a piece of software still allowed in managers?
Linux package repositories are not necessarily curated for software quality. Some are. Some aren’t, and that’s intentional.
Most of them are going to include Evolution though since it’s the official mail app for Gnome. The criticism is more reasonably directed at Evolution itself rather than distribution maintainers. Decent spam filtering with a low out of the box false-positive rate is a reasonable expectation from a “batteries included” mail client.
While you’re technically correct I feel the need to add that Evolution is an excellent mail client.
I have never had the problem described by OP, but I have never connected Evolution to a Gmail account either.
Here, I suspect a user setup error involving Google always doing things a little differently, breaking specs, just because they can and to piss the rest of us off. And to hold on to their quasi-monopoly of course.
In other words, Evolution devs/maintainers have the choice of doing it properly for most email providers that follow the IMAP/SMTP specs, or doing it properly for Gmail.