Re: spam.el: asking about removing spam-use-BBDB

[david.goldberg6@verizon.net (Dave Goldberg)]

> On Sun, Oct 23 2011, Dave Goldberg wrote:
>>>> I'd like to remove the spam-use-BBDB processor in spam.el.
>>>> I believe it's hardly used and after testing it for a while, I believe
>>>> it's not as good as I thought originally.
>> 
>>> I use bbdb as a whitelist and so set spam-use-BBDB-exclusive to t.
>>> Works exactly as I want it to.  If there's an alternative way to use a
>>> whitelist I am not afraid to change.
>> 
>> Since updating, I've run into a couple problems. First one I think I
>> figured out, but I wonder if it might still have some relevance - I
>> was seeing undefined function errors. I fixed that by recompiling with
>> a running Emacs that had bbdb loaded. However, now it seems that the
>> bbdb matching function is no longer matching addresses that are
>> clearly in my bbdb. Here's a snippets from *Messages*:

> It was probably `bbdb-search-simple' that was undefined: that function
> disappeared between BBDB versions 2 and 3, and spam.el is still using
> it. It's possible that by recompiling you ended up with a mish-mash of
> BBDB versions: what does `bbdb-version' report?

No.  I use gnus from git, Emacs 23.1.1 from Ubuntu, and bbdb 2.36 from sourceforge.  There is no bbdb 3 on my system; I still use XEmacs at work and as far as I can tell there's been no progress or even interest in porting bbdb 3 to XEmacs.  I share my bbdb file between home and work and trying to manage that with the different formats is simply not worth my while.  While I'm interested in the work going on in 3.X, 2.36 has been meeting my needs to date.

I'm guessing that one of the changes to spam.el wrapped the bbdb autoloads in eval-when-compile (I wish I were sufficiently familiar with git as I am with cvs and svn so I could more easily check) and since the emacs run out of make in my checkout directory doesn't include bbdb, or at least my full load path, the autoloads aren't in the elc.  I ran into a similar situation with eudc, requiring me to maintain a local copy of eudcb-bbdb.el.

I have, on occasion, seen a situation in which replies from someone on my whitelist to someone else who is not end up in spam due to the split-with-parent functionality, but that is not the case this time as even root level messages (from a threading perspective, sorry for not being able to think of a better term) are mysteriously being sent to spam.  Even weirder, in the same split, I've seen one message from a sender properly filed to inbox and another sent to spam.

Anyway, Ted did say he wanted to eliminate the bbdb engine, and I'm not worth keeping it around since all I need is a whitelist.  I notice that spam.el has a whitelist capability.  It's trivial to turn bbdb into a list of email addresses using bbdb-display-layout-alist; I'll give that a try.

Thanks,
-- 
Dave Goldberg
david.goldberg6@verizon.net