Re: bogofilter setup examples

["Ted Zlatanov" <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Tue, 19 Apr 2005, sluque@mun.ca wrote:

> Hello, I'm trying to set bogofilter (0.94.4) up with gnus 5.10.7 (Debian
> package) in GNU Emacs 21.4.1 (i386-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit, Xaw3d scroll
> bars) of 2005-03-17 on trouble, modified by Debian. I've read the relevant
> sections of the manual, but I'm having trouble understanding how I should
> proceed. Can somebody please point to some source where I can find
> examples?

Besides Jonas' setup, you can look at the other spam.el-related posts,
quite a few have complete configurations.

You have to start with

(require 'spam)
(spam-initialize 'spam-use-bogofilter) ; plus whatever other backends
                                       ; you want to use, look in the manual

(setq spam-split-group "spam")         ; this is the default anyhow

> I have all my incoming mail in different nnmaildir groups, and would like
> to have bogofilter tag all the incoming mail and put it in a
> nnmaildir:Spam group.

You have to put (: spam-split) in your nnmail-split-fancy list.  It
will use whatever backends you provided to spam-initialize above.  You
can also specify a backend here, e.g.

(: spam-split 'spam-use-BBDB)

and even a spam group to override the default spam-split-group:

(: spam-split 'spam-use-bogofilter "SPAM")

so you can have different backends send spam to different places.

> It also seems possible to manually mark messages as spam or ham from
> within any group, and have gnus move the spam marked messages to the
> spam group upon exit, or just leave it there if it's ham.

Yes, the logic depends on whether the group is classified as a ham
group, spam group, or neither (but basically, spam is always
processed).  You can change the classification of a group with `G c'
as usual.  There, you can also set the spam/ham exit processors and
process destinations.  Spam groups have the added distinction that all
unseen articles are marked as spam when you enter the group.

The spam/ham processor processes spam or ham when you exit the group.

The process destination says what will happen to the spam or ham: it
will be moved to a group or groups; it will stay and (if spam) be
expired; or it will be respooled.  All this is visible under `G c' as
spam/ham process destination choices.

> I understand it's also possible to use both actions to train
> bogofilter and update its word database. Hopefully I can learn how
> to do these things from an examples web page.

Basically, when you quit a summary buffer, some spam.el-related hooks
will be run to do what I describe above.  So use `G c' to add
spam-use-bogofilter to your spam/ham processors, and the exit hooks
will do the right thing.

If you need to use `G c' on many groups, consider using topics or the
gnus-parameters variable, that will let you group settings together.

By the way, I found bogofilter slow and its database got corrupted a
lot when I tried it.  Maybe it was just me, but I like the
SpamAssassin database and speed much better for local spam
processing.  Plus, SA lets you talk to a remote server if needed.

Ted