Email Client

[Dotan Cohen]

On 17/11/2007, Gene Heskett <gene.heskett at verizon.net> wrote:
> >> 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.

I'd agree, except for the fact that false positives/negatives need to
be marked. I go through the spam pile once a week and check all 15000
of them.

> 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.

You run Kmail as root? Who are you and what have you done with Gene?

> 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.

How do you train? Details, because I just may adapt your strategy.

> 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.

FWIW, Tbird doesn't pause at all when marking spam. You wouldn't
believe how quick it marks them.

Dotan Cohen

http://what-is-what.com
http://gibberish.co.il
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A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?