Re: [Evolution] Help me switch to evolution

[David Woodhouse <dwmw2 infradead org>]

On Fri, 2005-03-18 at 10:56 -0400, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> Meaning you have to send the junk message back to the server, but to a
> special "learn spam" address. Ditto for false positives. You don't
> gain anything special from Sieve filters in this case; it's still a
> hack.

Either to a special address, or just dump it into a special IMAP folder
which is fed to sa-learn and purged automatically. You could also use
IMAP flags for Junk, and an IMAP server which automatically invokes sa-
learn when the flag is either set or cleared by the user. But yes, all
of these possibilities are hacks, because there's no real standard way
of doing this.

> We do. "One man's spam is another man's ham".
> Our filtering is at delivery time, not SMTP time, since it's per-user.

What happens to messages which the user decides are spam? Presumably one
of:

 - Delivered to a spam folder which the user may never (or rarely) visit
(which is vaguely equivalent to:)
 - Blackholed silently with no feedback to the sender
 - A bounce is generated to the apparent sender, thus potentially
   spamming an innocent bystander with abusive bounces.

Note that if the first and second options above _aren't_ at least
vaguely equivalent, there's little point in the exercise anyway, because
it means the 'per-user' tuning of spam filtering hasn't allowed your
user to have any form of confidence in the accuracy anyway, and they're
still checking their spam folder regularly and in detail.

I'd quite like to be able to do per-user filtering, but I'd need to set
things up so I can do that at SMTP time, because I'm really not willing
to do any of the three options above, and can't see any alternative.

> I guess it depends on your environment. I can't tell our community
> (we're a university) "OK, I'm going to decide what incoming mail is
> spam and you can all take it or leave it".

Well, you _can_ do that, and some universities do. You just can't be
_too_ strict about what you call spam, that's all. In fact I have just a
few tens of users, and those are mostly using my machines _because_ of
the spam filtering that's done there. 

-- 
dwmw2