Re: spam filtering using IMAP ?

[Mats Lidell <matsl@contactor.se>]

>>>>> Ted wrote:

Ted> Some people (quite a few, in fact) don't have login access to the
Ted> IMAP server.  Most people can't install software on the IMAP
Ted> server.  So it's not always that easy to do classification on the
Ted> server.

Agreed. Even if it is natural it might be impossible for practical
reasons.

Ted> What exactly would you like moved to that special folder?  I'm
Ted> not sure how spam.el could help you for server-side splitting.

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. 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(!?).

What this all is about is to feed the article back to the server so
that the spam processing can be adjusted. One alternative is to mail
the article back to the server and there could be other ways
too. Using imap directly seems natural though.

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 might also be other problems with this approach that I haven't
realized yet that might make spam.el not the right vehicle for this.

Yours
-- 
%% Mats