Re: [Evolution] Need some help (I Got IT!!!)

["Patrick O'Callaghan" <poc usb ve>]

On Wed, 2004-03-31 at 07:10, Tony Earnshaw wrote:
> ons, 31.03.2004 kl. 12.07 skrev guenther:
[...]
> > You can entirely disabling filtering through SpamAssassin in Evolution.
> > No one is forced to. IMHO it is a better approach in UN*X land to use
> > applications, that already exist and proved to work very well. SA does
> > for you. There is no need to implement a Bayesian filter for any mailer
> > out there.
>
> This I don't understand. One of the strongest assets of SA is a Bayesian
> filter.

I think you've misunderstood Guenther. He's not slamming Bayesian
filters, he's saying there's no need to implement one in the
mail client when there are several standalone implementations
out there.

> SA is highly specialized software, intended for MTAs, not MUAs. It needs
> careful configuring and maintenance on a regular basis, it presumes a
> site admin who is capable of understanding and implementing
> site-specific Perl regular expressions and is capable of doing 'man' and
> running tests on a regular basis. SA runs normally as an extension to
> MTA server software. It has its own medium-volume mailing list devoted
> to the above. If Evo people start posting on it, they'll be talking
> another language. The Mozilla Bayes filter constitutes a reasonable
> subset (Bayes filtering) which actually complement site-wide filtering
> and needs no specialist knowledge.

This is true except for the last bit (the Mozilla filter is per-user,
not site-wide).

Spam filtering is a subset of general mail filtering, and
the whole problem with server-side filtering is that it's hard to
control when you have no direct access to the filter. The ACAP
protocol was intended for this among other things, but seems to have
died (at least on the CMU site), has very few client implementations
and on the server only works for Cyrus AFAIK. So we end up with kludges
such as a special Web page for the user to tune his filter, mark
certain messages as spam or ham, and so on. It's a mess. Nonetheless
we're going for it as it's the only game in town for a site like ours.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that the Evo junk controls (like
the Mozilla version) are basically irrelevant in this context, unless
they come ON be default, in which case I want them OFF.

(OT: If anyone's interested, what we plan to do on our site is decree
that all users with a Spam folder should look at it periodically
and move out any false positives they find. A cron job will mash the
Spam contents that are over N days old and then remove them. False
negatives should be moved to Spam by the user. This is not ideal since
we never mash the false positives, so in time it could skew the filter,
but tests seem to show this effect is minimal. This is a university
central mailhub BTW, with about 5000 users, soon to double. Users who
want to opt out simply delete or rename their Spam folder).

poc