Re: spam*.el and ifile-gnus.el?

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Sun, 29 Dec 2002, larsi@gnus.org wrote:
> Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:
> 
>> This is (to quote the comment) a bit raw, but the idea is that
>> whatever is marked as spam when you exit a spam group should be
>> reported as spam.  Reporting may mean bogofilter processing, ifile
>> submission, or submission to a spam service.
> 
> But the submission thing hasn't been written yet, I guess?

Not AFAIK.  I would allow the user to pipe it through an external
submitter, because the spam reporting logic is very complex if done
right.

Of course, these days reporting spam is becoming less useful since
spammers have started forging the message headers that let users trace
the message to the origin.

>> Ideas and patches to spam.el are welcome, of course.
> 
> I want to use spam.el now, but I'm not quite sure what's the
> recommended thing to use.  I think I want to let my mail be split as
> I normally do now, but have the non-classified mail be passed to
> something that will say whether it's spam or not.  Which is provided
> nicely by spam.el, but I wonder whether bogofilter or ifile is
> bestest?

That decision is up to you - spam.el is just intended to be a way for
users to choose their preferred way of sorting spam from non-spam.

Bogofilter is decent, and Kai and others swear by ifile.

<editorial>

I don't like statistical spam filters, personally, because they are
easily fooled.  Legitimate messages can look like spam (for instance,
a report of spam that crashes Gnus); spammers can easily insert
legitimate text in the message to offset word and sentence statistics.

I know statistical analysis is fashionable now, but there's no way
short of designing a full AI that spam can be identified by content
analysis.  We call a message spam when it's unsolicited, commercial,
and annoying.  Content can only determine the commercial nature of a
message, and even that is somewhat doubtful.  There's lots of messages
that meet only 2 of those three criteria.  I wouldn't want to classify
those messages as spam.

</editorial>

I think ORDB and such are the best way to detect spam.  Unfortunately
blackholes don't work in spam.el because of a bug in the DNS code I
reported a while ago; you may want to take a look at that.  I don't
think it was ever fixed, but Simon Josefsson may have looked at it.

> (And gnus-ifile.el isn't in the Gnus distribution.  It probably
> should be, right?)

That's up to the gnus-ifile.el author, I think he wanted to wait until
the package works with more backends.  I'm coming out of a long
Christmas break, sorry if I'm forgetting something...  My brain is not
up to non-holiday speed yet :)

Ted