Email Client

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 17 November 2007, Billie Walsh wrote:
>On 11/15/2007 Derek Broughton wrote:
>> KMail's been doing that for me for 7 years...  Sure you need to have
>> spamassassin or bogofilter (my choice) installed, but that's normal for
>> *nix systems - you shouldn't have spam detection implemented _in_ your
>> email client, when it's a separate task.
>
>Now you've piqued my curiosity.
>
>> you shouldn't have spam detection implemented _in_ your
>> email client, when it's a separate task.
>
>Why?
>
>To me it seems that would be the obvious place.

No, is not.  That puts all the onus to do all this into a foreground task, 
kmail, which when it has to do all that, freezes your user interface, 
sometimes for rather extended periods of time.  This should more properly be 
done as background tasks, separate from kmail itself.

Here, I pull from 3 servers, as an unpriviledged user, with fetchmail running 
every 90 seconds as a background task, which hands it off to procmail, also 
running as a normal user, which in turn runs most of it through spamassassin 
before dumping it into that users mail spool.  Then kmail, running as root 
cuz I do, pulls from that spool file, sorts it into the various folders and 
presents it to me to read.  And procmail/spamassassin are fairly well trained 
so its pretty safe to have procmail dump those with high spam ratings (7+) 
straight to /dev/null.  I train on what gets through, watch the logs and 
haven't had a false positive except for some of the junk my kids & their 
winderz boxes send me.  The next door neighbor also sends me all sorts of 
chain letter crap that while we're good friends, winds up in /dev/null too.

So the only pauses in kmail's composer now is only a second or two while its 
doing that sorting of what procmail actually passes.  That's a much nicer 
user experience IMNSHO.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
UH-OH!!  I think KEN is OVER-DUE on his R.V. PAYMENTS and HE'S having a
NERVOUS BREAKDOWN too!!  Ha ha.