[Q]: How good is gmane for you ?

[Q]: How good is gmane for you ?

[Xavier Maillard]

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Hi,

I am subscribed to tons of mailing lists and fetching all my mails is
getting longer and longer now (result in something to about 45minutes
every day). So I am looking at alternatives to the traditional mailing
lists and gmane seems to be the only one solution.

Alright. Now here comes my question: I am planning to agentize all
gmane groups I am used to read trough mailing lists. My main fear is
using agent to fetch my nrws (yeah this is news now ;)) I can miss some
post or they are not downloaded when I need them (most of time in the
train).

I am searching for an *excellent* tutorial on tweaking/tuning gnus
agent to decrease the risk not to have all the news content when I need
it.

Can you post here your solution to help me setup this as soon as
possible ? Is gnus agent feature a good solution when using gmane or
should I disable it (partially or totally) ?

Thank you for your answers.

zeDek
-- 
GnusFR  (http://www.gnusfr.org)
EmacsFR (http://www.emacsfr.org)

.emacs: Because customisation is fun!


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Re: : How good is gmane for you ?

[Adam Sjøgren]

On Wed, 03 Mar 2004 19:32:11 +0100, Xavier wrote:

> My main fear is using agent to fetch my nrws (yeah this is news now
> ;)) I can miss some post or they are not downloaded when I need them
> (most of time in the train).

(You really should get the train company to supply internet access
en route ;-))


  Best regards,

-- 
 "Mr. Cotton's... parrot. Same question."                     Adam Sjøgren
                                                         asjo@koldfront.dk

Re: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?

[Vasily Korytov]

On Wed, 03 Mar 2004 19:32:11 +0100, Xavier Maillard wrote:

> I am subscribed to tons of mailing lists and fetching all my mails is
> getting longer and longer now (result in something to about 45minutes
> every day). So I am looking at alternatives to the traditional mailing
> lists and gmane seems to be the only one solution.

1. AFAIK, it's so. But if you're subscribed to the lists, where spam
   takes a large amount of traffic, using gmane for them is the thing, I
   wouldn't recommend. Local spamassassin does help me much better, then
   Gmane spam filtering (yeah, I know, I can ``report as spam'' and
   such -- but using a dial-up it's really not comfortable).

2. I believe, switching to Gmane won't save you time, while fetching
   your mail. Likely it'd be vice versa, because your mailbox is
   supposed to be closer to you -- and faster (if it isn't so, you
   _really_ should change the e-mail provider).

> Can you post here your solution to help me setup this as soon as
> possible ? Is gnus agent feature a good solution when using gmane or
> should I disable it (partially or totally) ?

I have always recommended setting up a local newsserver. E.g. Leafnode
is very easy to set up and really fits for dial-up or alike.

-- 
       I accept RFC3156 and RFC2440-compatible encrypted mail.
PGP key fingerprint: 3273 7F6F 7B87 5DD5 9848 05FB E442 86BC 2E6B 6831

Re: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?

[Jon Ericson]

deskpot@despammed.com (Vasily Korytov) writes:

> On Wed, 03 Mar 2004 19:32:11 +0100, Xavier Maillard wrote:
>
>> I am subscribed to tons of mailing lists and fetching all my mails is
>> getting longer and longer now (result in something to about 45minutes
>> every day). So I am looking at alternatives to the traditional mailing
>> lists and gmane seems to be the only one solution.
>
> 1. AFAIK, it's so. But if you're subscribed to the lists, where spam
>    takes a large amount of traffic, using gmane for them is the thing, I
>    wouldn't recommend. Local spamassassin does help me much better, then
>    Gmane spam filtering (yeah, I know, I can ``report as spam'' and
>    such -- but using a dial-up it's really not comfortable).

Maybe things have changed since you last tried Gmane.  For on thing,
all mail is now passed through SpamAssasin and spam is cross-posted to
gmane.spam.detected.  Also, Gmane uses the clamav virus scanner to
throw away some viruses.  See <http://gmane.org/spam.php>.

Jon

Re: : How good is gmane for you ?

[Xavier Maillard]

On  3 mar 2004, Adam Sjøgren wrote:

On Wed, 03 Mar 2004 19:32:11 +0100, Xavier wrote:
> 
> > My main fear is using agent to fetch my nrws (yeah this is news now
> > ;)) I can miss some post or they are not downloaded when I need them
> > (most of time in the train).
> 
> (You really should get the train company to supply internet access
> en route ;-))

Hey, know what ? It is planned here :) 


-- 
Xavier Maillard, zedek@gnu-rox.org

Re: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?

[Xavier Maillard]

On  3 mar 2004, Vasily Korytov wrote:

On Wed, 03 Mar 2004 19:32:11 +0100, Xavier Maillard wrote:
> 
> > I am subscribed to tons of mailing lists and fetching all my mails
> > is getting longer and longer now (result in something to about
> > 45minutes every day). So I am looking at alternatives to the
> > traditional mailing lists and gmane seems to be the only one
> > solution.
> 
> 1. AFAIK, it's so. But if you're subscribed to the lists, where spam
> takes a large amount of traffic, using gmane for them is the thing, I
> wouldn't recommend. Local spamassassin does help me much better, then
> Gmane spam filtering (yeah, I know, I can ``report as spam'' and
> such -- but using a dial-up it's really not comfortable).

In fact what takes long here is the long anti-spam process. Each mail
is processed by 2 anti-viral and pass trough 3 different anti-spam. I
am quite paranoiac with spam and virus. What I know is, the last
process is taking more time than the rest combined. I don't really know
why. The last filtering process is done by feeding my local smtp
(postfix) and passing it to bogofilter via procmail. Shouldn't be a big
deal whereas my CPU load is at its maximum.
 
> 2. I believe, switching to Gmane won't save you time, while fetching
> your mail. Likely it'd be vice versa, because your mailbox is

Yes it will since I won't have to filter the news coming from gmane :)

> supposed to be closer to you -- and faster (if it isn't so, you
> _really_ should change the e-mail provider).

I am my own SMTP :p

> > Can you post here your solution to help me setup this as soon as
> > possible ? Is gnus agent feature a good solution when using gmane or
> > should I disable it (partially or totally) ?
> 
> I have always recommended setting up a local newsserver. E.g. Leafnode
> is very easy to set up and really fits for dial-up or alike.

I ear about "feeds" for inn but I just don't know what this is all
about :) Maybe I should investigate on that ?

zeDek
-- 
 In Gruuik we trust

Re: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?

[Simon Josefsson]

Xavier Maillard <zedek@gnu-rox.org> writes:

> Hi,
>
> I am subscribed to tons of mailing lists and fetching all my mails is
> getting longer and longer now (result in something to about 45minutes
> every day). So I am looking at alternatives to the traditional mailing
> lists and gmane seems to be the only one solution.

I've dropped most of my mailing list subscriptions in favor of gmane.
My mail spool look rather empty when I access it through SquirrelMail,
but I suppose that is a feature.

> Alright. Now here comes my question: I am planning to agentize all
> gmane groups I am used to read trough mailing lists. My main fear is
> using agent to fetch my nrws (yeah this is news now ;)) I can miss some
> post or they are not downloaded when I need them (most of time in the
> train).

I'm agentizing the gmane.org server (actually it was agentized by
default for me), and I'm using the following agent configuration:

 '(gnus-agent-consider-all-articles t)
 '(gnus-agent-enable-expiration (quote DISABLE))
 '(gnus-select-article-hook (quote (gnus-agent-fetch-selected-article ...

I think the first and the last are the most relevant ones.  I have all
messages, in the groups I'm interested in, on local disk.  I don't
have to do anything to make articles appear in the agent, but
sometimes I do `J s' for the fun of it.

If you don't want to risk losing all of your agent cache by invoking
the agent expiring process, you want the second line too -- IIRC, the
default is to expire stuff older than 7 days.  (I do think agent
expiring should be off by default, though.)

Also, you want to use scoring to remove spam from the gmane.org
groups.  Type `W e' in the *Group* buffer and add:

(("xref"
  ("gmane.spam.detected" -1000 nil s))
; ("xref"
;  ("gmane.mail.spam.spamassassin.sightings" -1000 nil s))
 (mark-and-expunge -100))

Unfortunately, the spamassassin installation at gmane.org seem to miss
a lot of spam, but I suppose I could use spam.el locally.

Re: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?

[Vasily Korytov]

On Wed, 03 Mar 2004 14:07:49 -0800, Jon Ericson wrote:

> deskpot@despammed.com (Vasily Korytov) writes:
>
>> 1. AFAIK, it's so. But if you're subscribed to the lists, where spam
>> takes a large amount of traffic, using gmane for them is the thing, I
>> wouldn't recommend. Local spamassassin does help me much better, then
>> Gmane spam filtering (yeah, I know, I can ``report as spam'' and
>> such -- but using a dial-up it's really not comfortable).
>
> Maybe things have changed since you last tried Gmane.

I use it every day. =)) If you would look in the headers of my messages,
you'd notice that.

> For on thing, all mail is now passed through SpamAssasin and spam is
> cross-posted to gmane.spam.detected. Also, Gmane uses the clamav virus
> scanner to throw away some viruses. See <http://gmane.org/spam.php>.

I know. I _really_ mean my local spamassasin does for me better, than
the one on gmane.org. I don't know, how this happens (my prefs for it
are really slightly tweaked), but it's a fact.

-- 
       I accept RFC3156 and RFC2440-compatible encrypted mail.
PGP key fingerprint: 3273 7F6F 7B87 5DD5 9848 05FB E442 86BC 2E6B 6831

Re: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?

[Xavier Maillard]

On  3 mar 2004, Jon Ericson wrote:

> deskpot@despammed.com (Vasily Korytov) writes:
> 
> > On Wed, 03 Mar 2004 19:32:11 +0100, Xavier Maillard wrote:
> > 
> > > I am subscribed to tons of mailing lists and fetching all my mails
> > > is getting longer and longer now (result in something to about
> > > 45minutes every day). So I am looking at alternatives to the
> > > traditional mailing lists and gmane seems to be the only one
> > > solution.
> > 
> > 1. AFAIK, it's so. But if you're subscribed to the lists, where spam
> > takes a large amount of traffic, using gmane for them is the thing,
> > I wouldn't recommend. Local spamassassin does help me much better,
> > then Gmane spam filtering (yeah, I know, I can ``report as spam''
> > and such -- but using a dial-up it's really not comfortable).
> 
> Maybe things have changed since you last tried Gmane.  For on thing,
> all mail is now passed through SpamAssasin and spam is cross-posted to
> gmane.spam.detected.  Also, Gmane uses the clamav virus scanner to
> throw away some viruses.  See <http://gmane.org/spam.php>.

And another advantage when not using mails, is that you no longer
spend/waste time to split your incoming exchanges. And just for that it
is worth.

So to resume the situation, I no longer need to launch my
anti-virus/spam, I no longer split my mails. Wow ! Why did I take so
much time to swithc ? :p

zeDek
-- 
No e-patents, pas de brevets logiciels
Pétition contre les brevets logiciels : http://petition.eurolinux.org

Re: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?

[Xavier Maillard]

On  3 mar 2004, Jon Ericson wrote:

> deskpot@despammed.com (Vasily Korytov) writes:
> 
> > On Wed, 03 Mar 2004 19:32:11 +0100, Xavier Maillard wrote:
> > 
> > > I am subscribed to tons of mailing lists and fetching all my mails
> > > is getting longer and longer now (result in something to about
> > > 45minutes every day). So I am looking at alternatives to the
> > > traditional mailing lists and gmane seems to be the only one
> > > solution.
> > 
> > 1. AFAIK, it's so. But if you're subscribed to the lists, where spam
> > takes a large amount of traffic, using gmane for them is the thing,
> > I wouldn't recommend. Local spamassassin does help me much better,
> > then Gmane spam filtering (yeah, I know, I can ``report as spam''
> > and such -- but using a dial-up it's really not comfortable).
> 
> Maybe things have changed since you last tried Gmane.  For on thing,
> all mail is now passed through SpamAssasin and spam is cross-posted to
> gmane.spam.detected.  Also, Gmane uses the clamav virus scanner to
> throw away some viruses.  See <http://gmane.org/spam.php>.

And another advantage when not using mails, is that you no longer
spend/waste time to split your incoming exchanges. And just for that it
is worth.

So to resume the situation, I no longer need to launch my
anti-virus/spam, I no longer split my mails. Wow ! Why did I take so
much time to swithc ? :p

zeDek
-- 
No e-patents, pas de brevets logiciels
Pétition contre les brevets logiciels : http://petition.eurolinux.org

Re: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?

[Jon Ericson]

deskpot@despammed.com (Vasily Korytov) writes:

> On Wed, 03 Mar 2004 14:07:49 -0800, Jon Ericson wrote:
>
>> Maybe things have changed since you last tried Gmane.
>
> I use it every day. =)) If you would look in the headers of my messages,
> you'd notice that.

Ok.  But that was far from clear in the body of your message.

>> For on thing, all mail is now passed through SpamAssasin and spam is
>> cross-posted to gmane.spam.detected. Also, Gmane uses the clamav virus
>> scanner to throw away some viruses. See <http://gmane.org/spam.php>.
>
> I know. I _really_ mean my local spamassasin does for me better, than
> the one on gmane.org. I don't know, how this happens (my prefs for it
> are really slightly tweaked), but it's a fact.

Unfortunately, a local SpamAssasin setup is only useful locally. :-(

Jon

Re: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?

[Xavier Maillard]

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On 3 mar 2004, Xavier Maillard stated:

> Hi,
> 
> I am subscribed to tons of mailing lists and fetching all my mails is
> getting longer and longer now (result in something to about 45minutes
> every day). So I am looking at alternatives to the traditional mailing
> lists and gmane seems to be the only one solution.
> 
> Alright. Now here comes my question: I am planning to agentize all
> gmane groups I am used to read trough mailing lists. My main fear is
> using agent to fetch my nrws (yeah this is news now ;)) I can miss
> some post or they are not downloaded when I need them (most of time in
> the train).
> 
> I am searching for an *excellent* tutorial on tweaking/tuning gnus
> agent to decrease the risk not to have all the news content when I
> need it.
> 
> Can you post here your solution to help me setup this as soon as
> possible ? Is gnus agent feature a good solution when using gmane or
> should I disable it (partially or totally) ?
> 
> Thank you for your answers.
> 
> zeDek

Just a word to say that as a beginner, I tried gmane this evening and
answered to a few post from here. I still doesn't see them neither here
nor onto the gmae group. I have rightly replied to all request from
gmane and I was told to wait 10 minutes but until now, there is nothing
appearing :(

THe only thing I clearly remember is that the From header was
zedek+news@gnu-rox.org instead of my usual zedek@gnu-rox.org. Do you
think this could have avoided my post (ie. I am not subscribed to ding
with zedek+news) ?

zeDek
-- 
GnusFR  (http://www.gnusfr.org)
EmacsFR (http://www.emacsfr.org)

.emacs: Because customisation is fun!


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Re: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?

[Xavier Maillard]

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On 3 mar 2004, Simon Josefsson verbalised:

 <snip>

> Unfortunately, the spamassassin installation at gmane.org seem to miss
> a lot of spam, but I suppose I could use spam.el locally.

You should definetely. The only drawback is that it is quite slow but
with my little bogofilter here and my spam.el settings, I didn't see
any spam since ages now. I think it's worth :)

zeDek
-- 
.o.                     | zedek (at) gnu-rox.org
..o Hacker Wonderland   | 
ooo                     | 


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Scoring examples (was: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?)

[Reiner Steib]

On Wed, Mar 03 2004, Simon Josefsson wrote:

> (("xref"
>   ("gmane.spam.detected" -1000 nil s))
[...]
>  (mark-and-expunge -100))

Does this setup already reject the spammy articles at XOVER level?  Or
will the headers or even the article be downloaded nevertheless?

I use leafnode2 with this filter rule [1].  I the above rule does
the same, we should add it to the examples in the Gnus manual.

BTW, didn't we previously have a section "Scoring Examples" (or
similar) in the manual?  Maybe it was in the old Gnus FAQ?  Maybe we
should add some of the (old) examples and new ones to (info
"(gnus)Scoring Tips") or into a separate node.

Bye, Reiner.

[1]
,----[ etc/leafnode/filters.example ]
| ### Do not fetch articles that Gmane considered spam (only effective in
| ### groups of the gmane hierarchy). Note that filtering on "Xref"
| ### already filters at XOVER level, see section EFFICIENCY in
| ### filterfile(8).
| newsgroups = gmane\..*
| pattern = ^Xref:.* gmane\.spam\.detected:
| action = kill
`----
-- 
       ,,,
      (o o)
---ooO-(_)-Ooo--- PGP key available via WWW   http://rsteib.home.pages.de/

Re: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?

[Raphaël Berbain]

Xavier Maillard <zedek@gnu-rox.org> writes:

> Just a word to say that as a beginner, I tried gmane this evening and
> answered to a few post from here. I still doesn't see them neither here
> nor onto the gmae group. I have rightly replied to all request from
> gmane and I was told to wait 10 minutes but until now, there is nothing
> appearing :(
>
> THe only thing I clearly remember is that the From header was
> zedek+news@gnu-rox.org instead of my usual zedek@gnu-rox.org. Do you
> think this could have avoided my post (ie. I am not subscribed to ding
> with zedek+news) ?

You know Gmane use a C/R scheme before allowing you to post, right ?
(See http://gmane.org/post.php).

My experience with respect to Gmane latency is very good: I generally
use a function to send/get messages which basically does

(gnus-agent-toggle-plugged t)
(gnus-group-send-queue)
(gnus-group-get-new-news)
(gnus-agent-fetch-session)
(gnus-agent-toggle-plugged nil)

And most of the time, articles posted through Gmane show up
immediately.  Actually, this always kind of amazed me, since I
suppose a post to Gmane has to go to Gmane, then the original ML,
then back to Gmane again.  But hey, whatever, It Works (tm).  Don't
know why, but it does.

-- 
Raphaël                                           GPG key ID: Ox564D67FD

Re: Scoring examples (was: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?)

[mailla]

Reiner Steib <4.uce.03.r.s <at> nurfuerspam.de> writes:

> 
> On Wed, Mar 03 2004, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> 
> > (("xref"
> >   ("gmane.spam.detected" -1000 nil s))
> [...]
> >  (mark-and-expunge -100))
> 
> Does this setup already reject the spammy articles at XOVER level?  Or
> will the headers or even the article be downloaded nevertheless?

Can you elaborate on XOVER ? 

For what I know scoring only happens *after* fetching so IMO, the entire article
is downloaded.

Regards,

zeDek

Re: Scoring examples

[Simon Josefsson]

Reiner Steib <4.uce.03.r.s@nurfuerspam.de> writes:

> On Wed, Mar 03 2004, Simon Josefsson wrote:
>
>> (("xref"
>>   ("gmane.spam.detected" -1000 nil s))
> [...]
>>  (mark-and-expunge -100))
>
> Does this setup already reject the spammy articles at XOVER level?  Or
> will the headers or even the article be downloaded nevertheless?

The latter.  The group is scored when you enter it, so the group
unread article count is often wrong as a result.  I'm not sure how
leafnode2 kill articles; if it re-uses the article id the killed
article would have got, then it works better (but with more work).

Re: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?

[Chris Green]

Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:

> I've dropped most of my mailing list subscriptions in favor of gmane.

I've done this to some extent.

Some lists don't have good moderators and/or aren't open to everyone's
postings so when migrating, change your subscription options to post
only if possible (if you post to that list)

Another problem is that in my mailing lists, my procmailrc dedupes
multiple mails so that I only get the mailing list posting 99% of the
time but replies come to you via email, it's a bit hard to filter that
personal To: since your email setup has no idea about the nntp world.

One other thing you might be giving up is the ability to use nnir.
The search interface for gmane is cute but the results are often hard
or slow to find the thread of conversation.  Anyone have a gmane.el
for searching?

All that being said, I'd be willing to pay for a gmane solution that
also hosted text newsgroups so I could centralize all my email/news
reading.
-- 
Chris Green <cmg@dok.org>
A good pun is its own reword.

Re: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?

[Simon Josefsson]

Chris Green <cmg@dok.org> writes:

> One other thing you might be giving up is the ability to use nnir.
> The search interface for gmane is cute but the results are often hard
> or slow to find the thread of conversation.  Anyone have a gmane.el
> for searching?

Making nnir work for nnagent shouldn't be too difficult, I think, and
would settle my needs (since I have all groups locally cached).

Re: Scoring examples

[Reiner Steib]

On Thu, Mar 04 2004, Simon Josefsson wrote:

> Reiner Steib <4.uce.03.r.s@nurfuerspam.de> writes:
>
>> On Wed, Mar 03 2004, Simon Josefsson wrote:
>>
>>> (("xref"
>>>   ("gmane.spam.detected" -1000 nil s))
>> [...]
>>>  (mark-and-expunge -100))
>>
>> Does this setup already reject the spammy articles at XOVER level?  Or
>> will the headers or even the article be downloaded nevertheless?
>
> The latter.  

Strange.  I always though that the summary can be built from the
overview data.

Some test:

,----[ ~/News/nntp+news.gmane.org:gmane.test.SCORE ]
| (("xref"
|   ("gmane.spam.detected" -1000 nil s))
|  ("subject"
|   ("test" -1 nil s))
|  (mark-and-expunge -100))
`----

After entering nntp+news.gmane.org:gmane.test (in Gnus 5.10.6), I get:

,----[ *nntp-log* ]
| 20040304T184412.725 news.gmane.org GROUP gmane.test
| 20040304T184412.774 news.gmane.org XOVER 1244-1343
`----

Of course, this is not possible anymore if you have some scoring rules
on head or body.

Another test with...

,----[ ~/News/nntp+news.gmane.org:gmane.test.SCORE ]
| (("xref"
|   ("gmane.spam.detected" -1000 nil s))
|  ("subject"
|   ("test" -2000 nil s))
|  (mark-and-expunge -100))
`----

...  gives the same nntp log output and the article with subject test
are expunged and become visible with `/ E'.

> I'm not sure how leafnode2 kill articles; if it re-uses the article
> id the killed article would have got, then it works better (but with
> more work).

When Xref is present in the overview data (this is always the case, I
think), the article is dropped already at this stage.  As for the
article _numbers_ (I don't know what your "article id" means here),
leafnode chooses the numbers independently from the numbers on the
upstream server(s).  So there are no holes in the number ranges.

Bye, Reiner.
-- 
       ,,,
      (o o)
---ooO-(_)-Ooo--- PGP key available via WWW   http://rsteib.home.pages.de/

Gmane search interface in nnweb.el (was: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?)

[Reiner Steib]

On Thu, Mar 04 2004, Chris Green wrote:

> Anyone have a gmane.el for searching?

There is nnweb.el in Gnus which already has a search interface for
Gmane (and also for Google).  But it was written for a previous
version of Gmane's search interface.  It should be a quite simple task
to update it to the current interface.  Alas, nobody volunteered to do
this job up to now.

Bye, Reiner.
-- 
       ,,,
      (o o)
---ooO-(_)-Ooo--- PGP key available via WWW   http://rsteib.home.pages.de/

spam-use-gmane-xref spam detection method (was: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?)

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Wed, 03 Mar 2004, jas@extundo.com wrote:

> Also, you want to use scoring to remove spam from the gmane.org
> groups.  Type `W e' in the *Group* buffer and add:
> 
> (("xref"
>   ("gmane.spam.detected" -1000 nil s))
>  (mark-and-expunge -100))

I didn't know about this!  I just added a spam-use-gmane-xref backend
to spam.el, to be used in the spam-autodetect-methods parameter for
Gmane newsgroups.  I already like it a lot - it's fast and unlike
scoring, specifically tags the articles as spam.

> Unfortunately, the spamassassin installation at gmane.org seem to
> miss a lot of spam, but I suppose I could use spam.el locally.

You can stack spam-autodetect-methods with spam-use-gmane-xref first
(to get all the easy ones) and then put spam-use-bogofilter,
spam-use-BBDB, or whatever you like in the spam-autodetect-methods to
be evaluated after the gmane-xref.

I hope someone finds this useful as well.

Ted

Re: Scoring examples (was: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?)

[Robert Marshall]

On Thu, 04 Mar 2004, Reiner Steib wrote:

>| ### already filters at XOVER level, see section EFFICIENCY in
>| ### filterfile(8).

That's filterfile(5) at least in my version

(pedantically)

Robert
-- 
La grenouille songe..dans son château d'eau

Re: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?

[Kai Grossjohann]

deskpot@despammed.com (Vasily Korytov) writes:

> I know. I _really_ mean my local spamassasin does for me better, than
> the one on gmane.org. I don't know, how this happens (my prefs for it
> are really slightly tweaked), but it's a fact.

But the OP has the problem that fetching mail takes long.  Running SA
locally means that you need to fetch all those spam, too.  Using Gmane
means that you can skip fetching most of the spam.

Kai

Re: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?

[Vasily Korytov]

On Wed, 03 Mar 2004 23:24:20 +0100, Xavier Maillard wrote:

> On  3 mar 2004, Vasily Korytov wrote:
>
> In fact what takes long here is the long anti-spam process. Each mail
> is processed by 2 anti-viral and pass trough 3 different anti-spam. I
> am quite paranoiac with spam and virus. [...]

I hate spam too (but I rely only on spamassassin and some header and
blacklist checks). Unfortunately, gmane spam filters are not good enough
for me (speaking honestly, they definitely _suck_: e.g. in
gmane.emacs.xemacs.user.russian they appear to filter legimate mail, but
pass a lot of spam), so, for some groups I prefer checking spam myself
-- because gmane may be faster, but _it simply does not filter
spam_. That almost equivs of having no filter -- which is much quicker,
may I assure you.

>> supposed to be closer to you -- and faster (if it isn't so, you
>> _really_ should change the e-mail provider).
>
> I am my own SMTP :p

Heh. I misunderstood you. I thought, ``fetching mail'' was a concern of
net connection, not your 3 spam filters and 2 antivirs.

>> I have always recommended setting up a local newsserver. E.g. Leafnode
>> is very easy to set up and really fits for dial-up or alike.
>
> I ear about "feeds" for inn but I just don't know what this is all
> about :) Maybe I should investigate on that ?

Eghm... If you want to read news offline, but do not want to have local
groups or, say, usenet <=> fido gate, leafnode is enough -- you don't
need inn/dnews and newsx/suck (they really may be hard to
understand). And its configuration is really simple and
straightforward. I've heard about other analogs, but never used them.

-- 
       I accept RFC3156 and RFC2440-compatible encrypted mail.
PGP key fingerprint: 3273 7F6F 7B87 5DD5 9848 05FB E442 86BC 2E6B 6831

Re: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?

[Jon Ericson]

[Cross-posting to gmane.discuss where this is on-topic]

deskpot@despammed.com (Vasily Korytov) writes:

> I hate spam too (but I rely only on spamassassin and some header and
> blacklist checks). Unfortunately, gmane spam filters are not good enough
> for me (speaking honestly, they definitely _suck_: e.g. in
> gmane.emacs.xemacs.user.russian they appear to filter legimate mail, but
> pass a lot of spam), so, for some groups I prefer checking spam myself
> -- because gmane may be faster, but _it simply does not filter
> spam_. That almost equivs of having no filter -- which is much
> quicker, may I assure you.

Filtering legitimate mail is a major problem in my opinion.  Have you
noticed which rules falsely label mail as spam?

If I understand correctly, having people actively correct spam
identification problems will help Gmane detect spam more accurately.
I'm not at all surprised that a primarily Russian language group would
have problems, since spam detection is mostly a linguistic problem.
Until people who understand Russian provide feedback, I doubt much
will change.

Jon

Re: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?

[Jason R. Mastaler]

Jon Ericson <Jon.Ericson@jpl.nasa.gov> writes:
>
> deskpot@despammed.com (Vasily Korytov) writes:
>
>> I hate spam too (but I rely only on spamassassin and some header
>> and blacklist checks). Unfortunately, gmane spam filters are not
>> good enough for me (speaking honestly, they definitely _suck_:
>> e.g. in gmane.emacs.xemacs.user.russian they appear to filter
>> legimate mail, but pass a lot of spam)

Uhm, have you contacted the list admins about adding spam filtering
for their lists?  IMO, Gmane's spam filtering is just a courtesy to
cover up for list admins who aren't doing their job.

Once the list admin has the spam problem under control, you can
request that spam filtering be turned off for the corresponding Gmane
groups.

Re: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?

[Vasily Korytov]

On Fri, 05 Mar 2004 16:24:26 -0800, Jon Ericson wrote:

> deskpot@despammed.com (Vasily Korytov) writes:
>
>> I hate spam too (but I rely only on spamassassin and some header and
>> blacklist checks). Unfortunately, gmane spam filters are not good enough
>> for me (speaking honestly, they definitely _suck_: e.g. in
>> gmane.emacs.xemacs.user.russian they appear to filter legimate mail, but
>> pass a lot of spam), so, for some groups I prefer checking spam myself
>> -- because gmane may be faster, but _it simply does not filter
>> spam_. That almost equivs of having no filter -- which is much
>> quicker, may I assure you.
>
> Filtering legitimate mail is a major problem in my opinion.  Have you
> noticed which rules falsely label mail as spam?

I belive, I didn't. Sorry. But I think, SUBJ_FULL_OF_8BITS is one of
them.

> If I understand correctly, having people actively correct spam
> identification problems will help Gmane detect spam more accurately.
> I'm not at all surprised that a primarily Russian language group would
> have problems, since spam detection is mostly a linguistic problem.
> Until people who understand Russian provide feedback, I doubt much
> will change.

Well, I tried to mark message as spam -- and not as spam, but, I belive,
too few times: on dial-up this is really uncomfortable.

-- 
       I accept RFC3156 and RFC2440-compatible encrypted mail.
PGP key fingerprint: 3273 7F6F 7B87 5DD5 9848 05FB E442 86BC 2E6B 6831

Re: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Sat, 06 Mar 2004, deskpot@despammed.com wrote:

> Well, I tried to mark message as spam -- and not as spam, but, I
> belive, too few times: on dial-up this is really uncomfortable.

Reporting spam with Gmane should be a single HTTP request, at least
that's how spam-report.el does it.  It should not be slow on dial-up
unless the Gmane side is slow.

Ted

Re: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?

[Vasily Korytov]

On Sun, 07 Mar 2004 00:17:41 -0500, Ted Zlatanov wrote:

> On Sat, 06 Mar 2004, deskpot@despammed.com wrote:
>
>> Well, I tried to mark message as spam -- and not as spam, but, I
>> belive, too few times: on dial-up this is really uncomfortable.
>
> Reporting spam with Gmane should be a single HTTP request, at least
> that's how spam-report.el does it.  It should not be slow on dial-up
> unless the Gmane side is slow.

Heh. At 3:00 and 9:00 mail is fetched using cron. I usually launch some
manual fetches too -- but that's done running a script on the machine
nearby, that fetches and sends everything and disconnects. And
connecting to the net to fetch one URL is really uncomfortable, may I
assure you.

-- 
       I accept RFC3156 and RFC2440-compatible encrypted mail.
PGP key fingerprint: 3273 7F6F 7B87 5DD5 9848 05FB E442 86BC 2E6B 6831

Re: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?

[Michael Schierl]

Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:

> Chris Green <cmg@dok.org> writes:
>
>> One other thing you might be giving up is the ability to use nnir.
>> The search interface for gmane is cute but the results are often hard
>> or slow to find the thread of conversation.  Anyone have a gmane.el
>> for searching?
>
> Making nnir work for nnagent shouldn't be too difficult, I think, and
> would settle my needs (since I have all groups locally cached).

Hmm, I don't know what nnir is (C-h i g (gnus) i nnir RET returns no
hits), but i guess that means you can use M-^ with agentized
groups. Yes, that would be really cool, since my former news reader
(Forté Agent) could do that when i was in offline mode, and I don't
really want to miss that feature.

Or at least "mark" an article by message ID to be fetched with next
J s regardless in which group it is (If you have none of the groups
the article goes to subscribed, perhaps put it into a special folder?)

The optimal solution IMO would be to search in the local agent
"database" first and only mark the article for retrieval when it is
not found there.

Or can I make Gnus do all this already and I just did not find it in
the manual?

Michael

PS: Yes i know, the local news server Hamster for Windows can do that,
but i don't want to have a config where i cannot read the same news
(fetched only once) both when booted into Windoze and into Linux.

Re: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Sun, 07 Mar 2004, deskpot@despammed.com wrote:

On Sun, 07 Mar 2004 00:17:41 -0500, Ted Zlatanov wrote: > On Sat, 06
Mar 2004, deskpot@despammed.com wrote: >
>> Reporting spam with Gmane should be a single HTTP request, at least
>> that's how spam-report.el does it.  It should not be slow on
>> dial-up unless the Gmane side is slow.
> 
> Heh. At 3:00 and 9:00 mail is fetched using cron. I usually launch
> some manual fetches too -- but that's done running a script on the
> machine nearby, that fetches and sends everything and
> disconnects. And connecting to the net to fetch one URL is really
> uncomfortable, may I assure you.

Just recently support was added for batching such reports through the
agent into a file, so when you plug back in, the file is processed
all at once.  If you don't use the agent, you can still use that
functionality to put spam reports in a file.  Look at spam-report.el
in CVS.

Ted

Re: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?

[Kai Grossjohann]

Chris Green <cmg@dok.org> writes:

> One other thing you might be giving up is the ability to use nnir.
> The search interface for gmane is cute but the results are often hard
> or slow to find the thread of conversation.  Anyone have a gmane.el
> for searching?

It ought to be possible to write a Gmane backend for nnir.  I vaguely
remember that Gmane uses article numbers in the web interface, and if
these are the same as the ones on the Gmane news server, then Bob's
our uncle.

Kai

Re: spam-use-gmane-xref spam detection method (was: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?)

[Xavier Maillard]

Ted Zlatanov <tzz <at> lifelogs.com> writes:

> 
> On Wed, 03 Mar 2004, jas <at> extundo.com wrote:
> 
> > Also, you want to use scoring to remove spam from the gmane.org
> > groups.  Type `W e' in the *Group* buffer and add:
> > 
> > (("xref"
> >   ("gmane.spam.detected" -1000 nil s))
> >  (mark-and-expunge -100))
> 
> I didn't know about this!  I just added a spam-use-gmane-xref backend
> to spam.el, to be used in the spam-autodetect-methods parameter for
> Gmane newsgroups.  I already like it a lot - it's fast and unlike
> scoring, specifically tags the articles as spam.

[OT]: how does spam.el deal with newsgroup group ? I am trying here to setup
spam.el for gmane but alas without success.

Another thing, it seems to me that only registering spam is working when exiting
gmane group (ie. there is no unregister spam feature). I wrote something since
Gmane *does* support unregistration. I will send my patch tonight as soon as I
am back home.

Regards,

zeDek

Re: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?

[era+gmane]

On Sat, 06 Mar 2004 15:39:44 +0300, deskpot@despammed.com (Vasily Korytov)
posted to gmane.emacs.gnus.general, gmane.discuss:
 > On Fri, 05 Mar 2004 16:24:26 -0800, Jon Ericson wrote:
 >> deskpot@despammed.com (Vasily Korytov) writes:
 >>> I hate spam too (but I rely only on spamassassin and some header and
 >>> blacklist checks). Unfortunately, gmane spam filters are not good enough
 >>> for me (speaking honestly, they definitely _suck_: e.g. in
 >>> gmane.emacs.xemacs.user.russian they appear to filter legimate mail, but
 >>> pass a lot of spam), so, for some groups I prefer checking spam myself
 >> Filtering legitimate mail is a major problem in my opinion.  Have you
 >> noticed which rules falsely label mail as spam?
 > I belive, I didn't. Sorry. But I think, SUBJ_FULL_OF_8BITS is one of
 > them.
 >> If I understand correctly, having people actively correct spam
 >> identification problems will help Gmane detect spam more accurately.
 > Well, I tried to mark message as spam -- and not as spam, but, I belive,
 > too few times: on dial-up this is really uncomfortable.

I went over that particular group and tried to the best of my ability
to fix it (but that includes complete disability to understand any
Russian, although I guess I manage to decipher a bit of cyrillics when
I have to).

It should be moderately readable over Loom now, but of course, the
NNTP view will only have the spam marked whenever Lars runs another
commit run.

The list really has been getting a lot of spam lately. Having it set
up to subscribers only would definitely help. There seems to be a
fairly stable set of regular posters but of course, if you're not one
of them, that doesn't help much, usability-wise.

/* era */

-- 
formail -s procmail <http://www.iki.fi/era/spam/ >http://www.euro.cauce.org/
cat | more | cat<http://www.iki.fi/era/unix/award.html>http://www.debian.org/

nnir and the agent (was: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?)

[Reiner Steib]

On Sun, Mar 07 2004, Michael Schierl wrote:

> Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:
[...]
>> Making nnir work for nnagent shouldn't be too difficult, I think, and
>> would settle my needs (since I have all groups locally cached).
>
> Hmm, I don't know what nnir is (C-h i g (gnus) i nnir RET returns no
> hits), 

»nnir.el --- search mail with various search engines«, see
contrib/nnir.el or
<URL:http://quimby.gnus.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/~checkout~/gnus/contrib/nnir.el?rev=HEAD&content-type=text/plain>
and the instructions included in this file.

Bye, Reiner.
-- 
       ,,,
      (o o)
---ooO-(_)-Ooo--- PGP key available via WWW   http://rsteib.home.pages.de/

Re: [Q]: How good is gmane for you ?

[Vasily Korytov]

On 09 Mar 2004 18:20:16 +0200, era wrote:

> I went over that particular group and tried to the best of my ability
> to fix it (but that includes complete disability to understand any
> Russian, although I guess I manage to decipher a bit of cyrillics when
> I have to).
>
> It should be moderately readable over Loom now, but of course, the
> NNTP view will only have the spam marked whenever Lars runs another
> commit run.
>
> The list really has been getting a lot of spam lately. Having it set
> up to subscribers only would definitely help. There seems to be a
> fairly stable set of regular posters but of course, if you're not one
> of them, that doesn't help much, usability-wise.

Thanks a lot!

Unfortunately, it has always been so in xemacs-users-russian: too low
traffic, too much spam. Surely, it's a list problem, not gmane's. Upper
in the thread (87r7w9d2x1.fsf@unix.home.local, not on gmane.discuss)
I've just said:

| [...] But if you're subscribed to the lists, where spam takes a large
| amount of traffic, using gmane for them is the thing, I wouldn't
| recommend. Local spamassassin does help me much better, then Gmane
| spam filtering (yeah, I know, I can ``report as spam'' and such -- but
| using a dial-up it's really not comfortable). [...]

I'm still with this opinion. Gmane may be not ideal for such lists --
but I must admit, they're b0rked anyway -- local hacks and filters may
really perform better. It's not because gmane is bad -- it's
wonderful. It's just.. life. =))

Thanks again.

-- 
       I accept RFC3156 and RFC2440-compatible encrypted mail.
PGP key fingerprint: 3273 7F6F 7B87 5DD5 9848 05FB E442 86BC 2E6B 6831

Re: spam-use-gmane-xref spam detection method

[Reiner Steib]

On Thu, Mar 04 2004, Ted Zlatanov wrote:

> On Wed, 03 Mar 2004, jas@extundo.com wrote:
[...]
>> (("xref"
>>   ("gmane.spam.detected" -1000 nil s))
>>  (mark-and-expunge -100))
>
> I didn't know about this!  I just added a spam-use-gmane-xref backend
> to spam.el, to be used in the spam-autodetect-methods parameter for
> Gmane newsgroups.  I already like it a lot - it's fast and unlike
> scoring, specifically tags the articles as spam.

I don't understand the doc-string:

,----[ C-h v spam-use-gmane-xref RET ]
| spam-use-gmane-xref's value is nil
| 
| Documentation:
| Whether the Gmane spam xref should be used by `spam-split'.
`----

How are Gmane (_nntp_?) groups related to splitting of incoming mail?

,----[ C-h f spam-split RET ]
| spam-split is an interactive compiled Lisp function in `spam'.
| (spam-split &rest SPECIFIC-CHECKS)
| 
| Split this message into the `spam' group if it is spam.
| This function can be used as an entry in the variable `nnmail-split-fancy',
| for example like this: (: spam-split).  It can take checks as
| parameters.  A string as a parameter will set the
| spam-split-group to that string.
| 
| See the Info node `(gnus)Fancy Mail Splitting' for more details.
`----

Bye, Reiner.
-- 
       ,,,
      (o o)
---ooO-(_)-Ooo--- PGP key available via WWW   http://rsteib.home.pages.de/

Re: Scoring examples

[Reiner Steib]

On Thu, Mar 04 2004, mailla wrote:

> Reiner Steib <4.uce.03.r.s <at> nurfuerspam.de> writes:
>
>> 
>> On Wed, Mar 03 2004, Simon Josefsson wrote:
>> 
>> > (("xref"
>> >   ("gmane.spam.detected" -1000 nil s))
>> [...]
>> >  (mark-and-expunge -100))
>> 
>> Does this setup already reject the spammy articles at XOVER level?  Or
>> will the headers or even the article be downloaded nevertheless?
>
> Can you elaborate on XOVER ? 

The XOVER NNTP command gives list certain headers (usually From,
Subject, References, Date, Xref) of postings:

,----[ $ telnet news.gmane.org nntp ]
| Trying 80.91.224.252...
| Connected to news.gmane.org.
| Escape character is '^]'.
| 200 main.gmane.org InterNetNews NNRP server INN 2.3.2 ready (posting ok).
| GROUP gmane.test
| 211 1273 51 1379 gmane.test
| XOVER 1378-1379
| 224 1378-1379 fields follow
| [...]
| .
| QUIT
| 205 .
| Connection closed by foreign host.
`----

See the relevant RFCs on NNTP for more.

> For what I know scoring only happens *after* fetching so IMO, the
> entire article is downloaded.

Nope, see <nntp:v9ishk8psw.fsf@marauder.physik.uni-ulm.de>.

Bye, Reiner.
-- 
       ,,,
      (o o)
---ooO-(_)-Ooo--- PGP key available via WWW   http://rsteib.home.pages.de/

Re: spam-use-gmane-xref spam detection method

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Fri, 12 Mar 2004, 4.uce.03.r.s@nurfuerspam.de wrote:

> I don't understand the doc-string:
> 
> ,----[ C-h v spam-use-gmane-xref RET ]
> | spam-use-gmane-xref's value is nil
> | 
> | Documentation:
> | Whether the Gmane spam xref should be used by `spam-split'.
> `----
> 
> How are Gmane (_nntp_?) groups related to splitting of incoming
> mail?

spam-split is actually more of a "spam-sorter" ever since
spam-split-symbolic-return was added to its control variables.

In this particular case, spam-split is invoked when you enter a NNTP
group (through the spam-autodetect mechanism) on the unseen articles.
The spam caught with the gmane-xref method is tagged with the
spam-mark.

> ,----[ C-h f spam-split RET ]
> | spam-split is an interactive compiled Lisp function in `spam'.
> | (spam-split &rest SPECIFIC-CHECKS)
> | 
> | Split this message into the `spam' group if it is spam.  This
> | function can be used as an entry in the variable
> | `nnmail-split-fancy', for example like this: (: spam-split).  It
> | can take checks as parameters.  A string as a parameter will set
> | the spam-split-group to that string.
> | 
> | See the Info node `(gnus)Fancy Mail Splitting' for more details.
> `----

So I guess the spam-split documentation is really what needs to be
improved, no?

Ted