Re: Trouble with spam.el and ifile

[David Z Maze <dmaze@MIT.EDU>]

Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:

> On Tue, 07 Jan 2003, dmaze@MIT.EDU wrote:
>> I've been using ifile-gnus.el for spam sorting, and figured I'd try
>> spam.el's newfangled ifile support.  Really fresh CVS...
>
> Excellent, my own guinea pig!  I mean, tester... :)

Oops, knew I shouldn't have spoken up.  :-)

>> Problem 2: Spam doesn't actually seem to get noticed by ifile, and
>> if I visit my spam group the articles are marked "Y" rather than
>> "H".  My .gnus file has, inside a setq block:
>> 
>>       spam-junk-mailgroups '("mail.misc.spam")
>>       spam-split-group "mail.misc.spam"
>>       spam-use-ifile t
>> 
>> My nnmail-split-fancy begins with (: spam-split) as pretty much the
>> first thing.  Any hints?
>
> Make sure you use the (customize-group "spam") interface.  It's much
> easier to get the format right that way.

Eew.  Um, I mean, okay.  The custom interface still doesn't make
things really clear.  (And I missed things doing C-h v spam-<TAB>,
because some of the variables are gnus-spam-*.)  But now I have

      gnus-spam-newsgroup-contents '(("mail.misc.spam" gnus-group-spam-classification-spam))
      gnus-spam-process-newsgroups '((".*" (gnus-group-spam-exit-processor-ifile)))
      gnus-spam-process-destinations '((".*" "nnml:mail.misc.spam"))
      spam-junk-mailgroups '("mail.misc.spam")
      spam-split-group "mail.misc.spam"
      spam-use-ifile t

Is this right?  It should be clearer in the documentation/Customize
descriptions where you need the backend prefix and where you don't.
It looks like all of this is set up with gnus-define-group-parameter,
and examples with e.g. expiry suggest you don't want it; it still
doesn't seem to work for me either way.  Now at least incoming
articles get filed properly, but if I find a misclassified spam
article and run 'S x' on it, it gets the 'H' mark but nothing happens
when I exit the group.  This happens both with and without the nnml:
prefix in the regexps above.

> Your spam group(s) need to have the ifile spam-processor added, and to
> have the spam-contents set to spam.  Customize the group or topic, or
> you can do it through customizing the gnus-spam-process-newsgroups
> variable.

...I *think* I've got this...

> The 'Y' mark stands for a lowered score, right?  spam.el only marks
> unread articles as spam on summary entry in a spam group, and only
> processes spam-marked articles with the group's spam processors on
> summary exit (for any group, not just spam groups).

Aha.  This makes it a little trickier for me to test, since most of my
spam happens to have a low score in my spam group.  If I mark an
article not-spam in the spam group, does it get refiled to the next
best group on exit?

Also, part of Jeremy Brown's ifile-gnus distribution is a Bourne shell
script that can scan an nnml directory tree and prime ifile with your
extant messages.  It might be good to incorporate this or something
like it into Gnus.  (This is especially true for spam-stat; doing this
classification entirely in elisp looks like it might be a big
performance win over ifile, but having to manually initialize
spam-stat from several hundred not-spam nnml groups would suck.)

-- 
David Maze             dmaze@mit.edu          http://www.mit.edu/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting.  Politicking should be illegal."
	-- Abra Mitchell