Re: spam.el: generic bayes interface?

[Hubert Chan <hubert@uhoreg.ca>]

>>>>> "Ted" == Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:

[...]

Ted> Yes, spam-use-regex-headers will do the right thing for splitting
Ted> incoming mail, but there's no SA specific backend.  Hubert Chan
Ted> wrote a SA backend, and I have been late in replying to his
Ted> questions.  It's coming, though.

I see it in CVS now. ;-)  I promised to write documentation too, but
that won't happen until at least next week some time.  In the mean
time, though, the variable documentation should probably suffice for
most people.

[...]

Ted> The problem is that then you force people into just one Bayesian
Ted> approach (how would SA and bogofilter work together?), and I'm not
Ted> sure it's a good idea.  Granted, most people use just one Bayesian
Ted> filter, so it's probably nice to switch filters with just one
Ted> thing.

Well, there are at least some good reasons that someone might want to
use multiple Bayesian filters.  For example, one might want to just try
out the effectiveness of one filter, while retaining their original
filter as a backup.  Also, if one wishes to switch Bayesian filters,
and does not have a corpus of spam/ham to train the filter, there would
have to be a transition time during which the new filter is trained,
while the old filter is still being used for splitting.  And, of
course, during this time, one would still want to keep training the old
filter at the same time.

This got me thinking, though, Ted, that the registration code for the
spam/ham processors is pretty similar.  They seem to mostly work in one
of two ways -- either register one at a time, or register multiple
articles at a time in a mbox-style format.  I think they all feed the
articles via standard input.  I would imagine that we would be able to
share a lot of common code.  Maybe write a function that feeds the
article(s) to the registration program, and pass the name of the
program and its arguments as arguments to that function.  Then the
registration functions just have to call that function with the
appropriate arguments.  Hmm.  I'll have to look at the code to see if
that would actually work...

-- 
Hubert Chan <hubert@uhoreg.ca> - http://www.uhoreg.ca/
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