Re: spam-stat and base64 encoded messages

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Mon, 09 Jun 2003, harder@myrealbox.com wrote:
> I think that to make this work correctly, you'll need to parse the
> MIME structure of the message, and then apply the proper decoding to
> the approriate parts.

Hmm, are you sure we need to do full MIME parsing?  That would slow
down the incoming mail splitting a lot, I would think.  But I don't
know all the Gnus MIME parsing functionality, or how fast it is.  See
below for more questions.

John Owens (cc-ed on this) was asking about forwarded spam messages,
which are inside an envelope from SpamAssassin.  That's another case
where spam-split or spam-stat-split has to do a lot of parsing.  Maybe
there's a better way?  

We can invoke spam-split or spam-stat-split on each part of the
messages, then if they return t we know it's ham; if they return a
string it's spam, and nil means the part was neither.  In other words,
we don't care about the deep structure, for instance one attachment
inside another.  We just want to find MIME boundaries, take the text
up to the next MIME boundary (even if it includes other MIME
boundaries), decode if needed (no decoding should be done on plain
text!), and analyze the part.  Is that possible already?

Referring to the decode-if-needed part, is the
gnus-article-decode-hook going to try decoding content even if it's
plain text or is there some detection done?  If not, spam.el and
spam-stat.el or gnus-art.el should do some heuristics.

Thanks
Ted