Re: spam.el: automatically resplitting ham in a spam group?

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Wed, 19 Nov 2003, lorentey@elte.hu wrote:

> I may have missed something obvious, but is there a way to
> automatically resplit the ham that I find in a spam group?
> Currently they all go to a designated mail group and then just sit
> there until I remember to resplit them by hand, which kind of works,
> but is not very nice.

Short answer: it can be done.

> My mail splitting is handled entirely by Gnus.
[...]
> I think all this is not unsimilar to some previously discussed
> configurations.  Does this sound all right to you, or is this setup
> a perverse hack of the delicate instrument that is spam.el? :-)

Your setup is very similar to mine.  I'm not sure if it's optimal,
but it works well for me.  I'm pretty paranoid about missing
important mail, though.

> My problem is what to do with false positives in
> mail.spam.candidates.  When I mark them as ham and exit the
> candidates group, I would like to have them (1) unregistered as spam
> (if needed), (2) registered as ham, and (3) re-fed to the mail split
> mechanism as if the message had just arrived in my inbox.  I
> understand that (1) will be solved elegantly with the registry, and
> I am happy to wait for it.

Good.  I'm already able to remember the act of registering spam/ham,
now I need to have a way to undo that act.  It's coming.

> But I could not find an easy solution for (3): I have even
> considered setting up an nnmaildir group, and then adding its
> directory to my mail-sources, but that practice is explicitly
> discouraged in the manual, so I hesitate to do that.  Could someone
> help me with this?

You can set a ham-destination of "INBOX" or wherever your incoming
mail comes from.  That might help you (but make sure to tell spam.el
to mark ham unread before moving it to INBOX).

The problem with automatic resplitting is that it could send your
mail back to the spam folder.  I don't like that possibility.  I
could make a ham-destination option to use 'respool instead of a
group name, but just recently there was discussion of a nnimap bug
with respooling.  What if the respooling returns nil, do we leave the
ham message in the spam group?

By the way, recently I added multiple spam/ham-process-destinations.
So now from a spam group, you can send ham to "INBOX" and to a
"train_ham" group.  I find that very useful for training, since
"train_ham" will only contain the misclassified messages.  With your
setup, you may like it too.

Ted