Re: spam filtering using IMAP ?

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:

> On Thu, 09 Jan 2003, kohrs@castify.net wrote:
>> Can one spam filter when using nnimap for all email?
>> 
>> I guess the answer is still "NO!".
>> 
>> IMHO the reason for this is that when nnimap splits, it only loads
>> the headers and not the bodies of the articles, so that the spam
>> recognition which is based on the bodies may not be used.
>
> As far as spam.el is concerned, it only looks at whatever is in the
> current buffer when spam-split is invoked.  Spam and ham processors
> use the full body of the message at summary exit, so in spam-split we
> have the only difference of opinion between the nnimap and other
> backends.
>
> It's worth noting that 
>
> 1) many people don't use spam.el (the majority)
>
> 2) we don't want nnimap to download full articles when splitting, even
>    with spam.el, because whitelist/blacklist/BBDB/blackhole splitters
>    don't need the full article
>
> So I would suggest that this could be an option that spam-split could
> set when dealing with a nnimap backend and a splitter that needs the
> full message.  For instance, spam-use-ifile would require full nnimap
> downloads, but spam-use-blackholes wouldn't.
>
> nnimap gurus, is that possible?

Fancy splitting works for nnimap, so maybe what you propose simply
just works?  (Assuming spam.el uses fancy splitting, I'm afraid I
haven't had time to look at it.)  Adding a variable that will make
nnimap download entire articles (and then limiting to the headers,
like nnmail do) should be doable if it is needed.