Re: [Evolution-hackers] Spam filtering thoughts

[Dan Winship <danw ximian com>]

On Fri, 2003-08-08 at 16:19, Ettore Perazzoli wrote:
> I think we need to have some built-in anti-spam functionality in Evo
> 2.0.
> 
> A possible list of requirements for this feature:
> 
>       * It should be simple, work out of the box and make sense.

This is a "possible" requirement? :)

>       * We add a way for Camel to mark a message as spam or not.  It
>         should probably have to be a bit in the summary, the same way we
>         handle things like colors/labels.
>
>       * We invoke Spamassassin in spam detection mode every time a new
>         message goes through the mailer, and set the corresponding bit
>         in Camel according to what it tells us about the message.

SpamAssassin generates some useful information beyond "spam/not spam". I
like being able to look at the report header to see which rules
triggered on a message, although that may be a power-user sort of thing
that normal users don't want.

But I think having the spam score be available is definitely good,
because messages that are just over the spam threshold are more likely
to be false positives than messages that are way over the threshold.
There are two things you can do with that:
      * Have two thresholds, a lower one for "mark as spam", and a
        higher one for "automatically throw away".
      * Sort your spam vfolder by score, so that if you have 50 messages
        in it, you can scan just the first 10 or so looking for false
        positives

>       * We put a button in the mail toolbar to mark a message as spam or
>         not spam.  When a message gets marked by the user as spam or not
>         spam, Evolution sends it to Spamassassin to train the filter
>         accordingly.

Do we want to support running "spamassassin -r" to report it to spam
databases as well?

And the inverse possibility; it would be nice to be able to check a box
to turn on the "-L" flag (local tests only), since that speeds things up
a lot and still does a very good job.

>       * Should the "Junk" folder be implemented as a vfolder, like the
>         Trash?

Yes.

-- Dan