Re: wallowing out of the spam quagmire

[Jonas Steverud <tvrud@bredband.net>]

Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> writes:

> Listening to various posts on that it seems have all the earmarks of
> being a pain in the butt.

Both yes and no. The problem is to understand how spam.el works. It is
not complex, the documentation is simply not yet complete. Read it
before you continue with this email.

>    1) procmail/SpamAssassin based pre filtering (before gnus)

I assume it places all spam in a specific group, lets for the
discussion call it nnfolder:Spam.

>    2) Inside gnus: Bogofilter based spam/ham database buiding tools.

I have a specific group to where all my spam is splitted during
fetching and all other groups are unclassified - it might be spam as
well as ham in those groups, spam.el don't make an assumption. Any
ham in the spam group (nnfolder:Spam) is marked by ! and upon exit it
is respooled.

I use bogofilter and I leave all encountered spam in the group it ends
up in and let the expire process delete it. I would like to make Gnus
delete it at once since I in some groups have a long expire-wait, 3-4
weeks. If this is possible or not, I don't know.

I use Group Topics in the *Group* buffer.

My set up:

I have added (: spam-split) to the beginning of the nnmail-split-fancy
variable and before it I have  (: gnus-registry-split-fancy-with-parent).

The group parameters I've added:

On the top email topic (all email groups are below this one):
((comment
  (spam-contents gnus-group-spam-classification-ham))
 (spam-process
  ((spam spam-use-bogofilter)
   (ham spam-use-bogofilter)))
 (spam-process-destination) ;; No process destination!
 (comment
  (ham-marks
   (gnus-del-mark gnus-read-mark gnus-killed-mark gnus-kill-file-mark gnus-low-score-mark gnus-expirable-mark gnus-ancient-mark))))

The two commented lines are nice when you train bogofilter the first
time. Just enter each non-spam group and then exit and bogofilter will
train on all as ham. Delete or comment away afterwards.

On my spam group, i.e. nnfolder:Spam, I have added:
((expiry-wait . immediate)
 (ham-process-destination respool)
 (spam-contents gnus-group-spam-classification-spam)
 (ham-marks
  (gnus-ticked-mark)))

Expire at once, respool all found ham, all ticked articles are ham and
everything else is spam.

And finally, my .emacs:

(setq spam-split-group "Spam" ; Important that  "nnfolder:" is *NOT* included!
      spam-use-bogofilter t
      spam-use-BBDB t ;; Use BBDB as a whitelist
      spam-log-to-registry t
      spam-mark-ham-unread-before-move-from-spam-group t
      spam-move-spam-nonspam-groups-only nil ; No moving at all.
      spam-disable-spam-split-during-ham-respool t
      )

(spam-initialize) ;; Loads the spam.el package etc.
(gnus-registry-initialize)

I think that's it. You might be interested in the autodetection
mechanism, that way it tries to detect spam in groups you enter, but
this is not necessary since you use spamassassin and probably will use
spam-split. It might be a nice idea if you read USENET.


HTH!

-- 
(        http://hem.bredband.net/steverud/        !     Wei Wu Wei     )
(        Meaning of U2 Lyrics, Roleplaying        !  To Do Without Do  )