Re: spam filtering using IMAP ?

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Thu, 09 Jan 2003, kohrs@castify.net wrote:
> Can one spam filter when using nnimap for all email?
> 
> I guess the answer is still "NO!".
> 
> IMHO the reason for this is that when nnimap splits, it only loads
> the headers and not the bodies of the articles, so that the spam
> recognition which is based on the bodies may not be used.

As far as spam.el is concerned, it only looks at whatever is in the
current buffer when spam-split is invoked.  Spam and ham processors
use the full body of the message at summary exit, so in spam-split we
have the only difference of opinion between the nnimap and other
backends.

It's worth noting that 

1) many people don't use spam.el (the majority)

2) we don't want nnimap to download full articles when splitting, even
   with spam.el, because whitelist/blacklist/BBDB/blackhole splitters
   don't need the full article

So I would suggest that this could be an option that spam-split could
set when dealing with a nnimap backend and a splitter that needs the
full message.  For instance, spam-use-ifile would require full nnimap
downloads, but spam-use-blackholes wouldn't.

nnimap gurus, is that possible?

Ted