Evo 1.5 and local/server side SA (was Re: [Evolution] Need some help (I Got IT!!!))

[Rick DeNatale <rick denhaven2 homeip net>]

On Wed, 2004-03-31 at 02:16 +0200, Tony Earnshaw wrote:

> The thing is, Mozilla is using pure Bayes (AFAIK) and Evo is using
> SpamAssassin of unknown (to me) heritage (uses Bayes, but SA has a lot
> more besides). My present version is 2.63 and I can do one heck of a lot
> to make it work better for my site than Evo can.
>
> I agree that one should be able to switch it on and off (what's the
> point of having an SA-shooche mail admin and then stuffing the mail
> through someone else's version of one's own thing?)

I'm also running SA 2.63 and I've recently taken the plunge to the 1.5
Evo stream.

After some head scratching, it actually looks like Evo 1.5 works very
nicely with my installation of SA.

I've always run SA and used fetchmail to get my mail from the ISP. I
also have a local sendmail server so that I have a back channel e-mail
path so that I can get mail from lists which get blocked by my ISPs
ill-considered DNSBL blocking.

Before Evo 1.5 I had a vfolder whose filter collected mail marked
[SPAM], and I set up my other vfolders to avoid such spam. In order to
train SA, I had local folders called "Uncaught Spam" and "Ham" that I
could move misclassified email into. Then I'd periodically run a script
which trained SA on these, un-SpamAssassinified the ham and moved it to
another local mailbox called ProcessHam and then emptied the "Uncaught
Spam" and "Ham" mailboxes.

I always thought that the last step was a little violent since I was
yanking these mailboxes out from under Evo.

With Evo 1.5 here's my setup:

1) I set my mail preferences to not check incoming mail for spam (junk
in Evo 1.5 parlance) because my procmail/SA path has already done it.

2) I created a filter which sets the status of incoming mail to Junk if
the subject starts with [SPAM]  this is what Evo would do if I turned on
the Evo filtering.

3) No more "Uncaught Spam" and "Ham" folders.  The Junk and "Not Junk"
actions in Evo 1.5 do the job better. If I find some spam which snuck
through, I just hit the Junk button, this marks the e-mail as junk so
that it ONLY shows up in the Junk folder, and it also runs SA-learn to
train SA. The same happens with junk which shouldn't be, although I
honestly don't get very much of that, so I can't say whether it also
runs it back through SA to get it back to it's "original" form.

Before I figured this out, I was also unhappy about Evo's spam
filtering, now that I have, I think that it's great.