Re: can gnus-unread-mark be a ham mark?

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Fri, 31 Oct 2003, billw@wolfram.com wrote:

> When I find ham in my spam group, I have a long-standing habit of
> unmarking it with M-u (gnus-summary-clear-mark-forward), then moving
> it somewhere useful to be acted on.  According to gnus-sum.el, it
> looks as though M-u marks the message with gnus-unread-mark.

> I suspect spam.el could move the message for me when I exit the
> group if only it recognized gnus-unread-mark as one of the ham
> marks.  However, since spam.el doesn't currently notice
> gnus-unread-mark, my newly-unmarked ham isn't handled by spam.el
> when I exit the group.

> So I have a few questions:
> 
> - Does it make sense to consider these unmarked messages (messages
>   marked with gnus-unread-mark) as ham when exiting a spam group?
>   It sure does to me, but maybe I'm weird.

You can, by just adding the 'unread' mark to the list of ham marks
without using the customization interface.  That would be all that was
needed.  I have made a conscious effort to keep the 'unread' mark out
of the ham marks' available choices, because I want unread messages to
be considered unclassified.  Read below for my own solution to this.

> - What's a good way to make gnus-unread-mark one of the recognized
>   ham marks?  I hesitate to copy (gnus-define-group-parameter
>   ham-marks... from gnus.el and redefine it in one of my startup
>   files.

Here's what I do: I have the ! (ticked) mark as a ham mark.  I also
have the ham-process-destination parameter of my spam group set to
"mail" (my default mail group), and the
spam-mark-ham-unread-before-move-from-spam-group variable set to t.
Also I have my spam group's spam-process-destination set to "train"
(which is used for SpamAssassin training on my IMAP server), but you
don't need to do that.

That way, I go into my spam group, mark ham with `!', and just exit
the group.  

All new articles were marked as spam when I entered the spam group, so
now the ones still marked as spam are all moving to the "train"
(spam-process-destination) folder.  There is no spam-exit-processor
because the training is done on the IMAP server.

The ham-marked articles, namely the ticked ones, get moved to "mail"
and *unmarked* (this is the part I think you want), so they look fresh
and new.  I don't use a ham-exit-processor on them currently.

> - Should gnus-unread-mark be added to the default value of
>   gnus-parameter-ham-marks-alist?

No, I think we need an 'unclassified' mark, which 'unread' is right
now implicitly.  But it can be added to the customize choices.

> Thanks for this magnificent spam-fighting machinery, Ted!

It feels more like a swiss army knife with a saw blade attachment, but
thanks :)  I'm working on the promised integration with the registry
so articles won't get registered as spam/ham twice; after that I may
redo a lot of the spam.el code to be more generic and flexible.
Also, some "wizards" (heh, "angels") for configuring novice users'
setups would be nice.  All in all, I think spam.el is approaching a
stable 1.0 point, but it can be a lot better.

Ted