Comment 4 for bug 236360

I have at last tracked down the glitch. It seems that yet another package designed to work with evolution, nautilus-sendto, has evolution as a recommends, and evolution has spamassassin and gnome-pilot as recommends, so the update-manager sees the 2-step connection and keeps flagging spamassassin as needed, plus the other packages....

I took Sebastian's hint and used one of the more advanced aptitude commands - aptitude why spamassassin.

So now I have removed nautilus-sendto my system no longer demands spamassassin.