Re: [Evolution-hackers] Spam filtering thoughts

[Ettore Perazzoli <ettore ximian com>]

On Sun, 2003-08-10 at 16:22, Christopher Ness wrote:
> Ok, here's the kicker.  What is the most important thing that we know
> about SPAM. It changes faster than developers can produce solutions.
> 
> Spamassassin is a great product, but a year from now something else may
> come along that is better (even if SA tries to adapt, who knows what the
> future holds!).
> 
> The *most* important part of this feature should be it's
> "pluggability".  Do not ruin a good product by bloating it.

Tayloring a specific spam filter makes it *much* easier to implement and
test the thing.

It's true that spam filters change, but so does Evo, so if something
else comes up we can add support for it later.  Let's not complicate our
lives unnecessarily for now.

(It's also true that the mailer does need a generic plug-in mechanism
and that spam filtering could be implemented as part of that...  But
that's a long-term goal, and I'd rather not block on it.)

To provide a basic amount of tweaking, we can also put the commands for
invoking sa-learn and spamassassin in GConf, so if a user wants to use a
different filter he just has to tweak the GConf keys and/or write some
scripts to bridge to a different filtering mechanism.

-- Ettore