Re: spam filtering using IMAP ?

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Thu, 16 Jan 2003, matsl@contactor.se wrote:
> I haven't designed the details (much less tested it) but what I
> envision is to move an article that is spam and not classified as
> such to one folder, lets say mark-as-spam, and move good articles
> that are classified as spam to another folder, lets say
> mark-as-ham. 

How do you know if an article is spam or ham?  The user has to
determine that, right?  Or are you talking about automated server-side
classification?  I'm a little confused, maybe it would help if you did
a scenario of what happens to a message on the mail server and on the
client machine - what programs get invoked, what the user has to do...

> Then I would have some server code that feeds these articles to the
> spam statistics engine and at the same time move the mark-as-spam
> articles to the spam folder and the mark-as-ham articles to the
> inbox(!?).

I'm not sure how doing this on the server makes a big difference.
spam.el supports all that on the client side, and the only penalty you
pay is retrieving the article body.  Maybe you want to have a single
place to store message statistics?

You could run Gnus on the server, I guess...

> It is here that spam.el comes in for supporting this scheme in
> gnus. If I get how this works it uses different marks to
> intelligently find out whether articles need reclassification based
> also on normal operations on the article. (Philosophy: If I do this
> with the article then it must be spam or it must be ham.)

> On the other hand a very natural thing to do with ham found in the
> spam folder is to move them directly to the folder where they should
> be. This deletes the article in the spam folder and I don't know if
> spam.el on exit from the summary buffer will be able to access the
> article so that it could be copied to the mark-as-ham folder for
> later statistics processing.

There's the spam-process-destination and ham-process-destination group
parameters, which let you move spam or ham articles at summary exit.
You can set them for a group, a topic, or a regex matching the group
name.

They are set to nil by default, which means "expire spam, leave ham
alone."  When you set those parameters, spam articles get moved from
any group into a spam-process-destination group.  Ham articles must be
in a spam group to be moved to a ham-process-destination.

Is that helpful?  Or do you have something else in mind?

You should probably look at the CVS Gnus manual if you haven't
already.  It explains all the spam.el behavior and parameters.

Thanks
Ted