Email Client

[Derek Broughton]

Wulfy wrote:

> 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.
>>   
> In what other area would you need spam detection?  The only way that I'm
> aware of that spam gets onto my system is through e-mail.

Where in the email process?  Some of us run full servers - email gets sent
to a postfix (or other mta) on the Ubuntu machine.  That's the _best_ place
to filter spam, because it can be refused at the time of sending (and if
you particularly hate spam, you can hang onto the connection and prevent
the sender using it to send _other_ spam!).  Others, like me, use fetchmail
to pull mail from many sources, and it's appropriate to have fetchmail
process the mail through a spam filter.  Then others just use a mail client
to fetch from an ISP.  In all three cases, the program receiving the mail
from the Internet _is_ the client, so why not create one spamfilter program
that can plug into any of those clients, rather than one for every client?

> So the e-mail 
> client *is* the appropriate place to put the spam detecting task, IMHO.

For you.  (Actually, for me too)
 
> It always amazes me when people assert that "something should be a
> separate task" in Linux and not built in to an appropriate program.

If it does, you should always stop and consider why they would say that. 
I've fought for years with the people who say an email client shouldn't
speak SMTP.  I think it should, because it has to output it's mail to
_somewhere_ and I don't see why it makes less sense to speak SMTP than to
speak "sendmail".  So, I disagree with making everything separate as a
general principle, too, but it really does depend on what you want.

> Then a little later, there'll be a debate about text editors and people
> will be praising Emacs...  which is an operating system all to itself
> which uses *nix as a boot loader...

Well, duh!  Of _course_ we'll be going there... :-)
-- 
derek