Question about Ubuntu and other Linux distributions as cellphoneOS

[Peter Flynn]

On 31/10/2024 08:25, gene heskett wrote:
[...]
> I have NDI what gmail is doing today, 

I don't think you're missing anything :-)

> I backed out of it when the spam I got was related to the last msg I
> sent thru them, That was about twenty years ago. That was the last
> straw.
My university's alumni email is hosted by Gmail, but I never get any 
spam on there. Maybe someone/something else is filtering it; if so, 
they're doing a great job. I do get some other garbage on there but it's 
from other alumni :-)

My other Gmail address is only there to let me operate a Google Groups 
mailing list and to provide a sacrificial address for a handful of 
services which are easier to work with using a Gmail address. In the 20 
or so years I've had the address, I have had maybe half a dozen spam 
messages, all in some way related to things I have bought online...but 
that's why I use that address.

My non-Gmail address, however (this one) gets hundreds of spams, as I 
have had the address for decades and I use it for mailing lists as well 
as for my business and public activities, so it's easily harvestable.

But that's why I use Thunderbird (on all accounts): its filtering seems 
to get all of them. Maybe two or three a year escape the net, and maybe 
the same number of false positives (I check monthly). But see below...

> Now i'm using t-bird, which only soso, filters only work when they
> want to.
I's surprised: mine seem to be operating exactly as I expect them.

> T-bird misses the filter mark by not having a /dev/null target for
> hotmail and outlook.com  I've not got anything but spam & phishing
> from them in at least 3 years.

I don't think you can select /dev/null as the target for detected spam 
in any Tbird account; at least not in the version I'm using (115.15.0).
I guess I could pick a local folder for the target, and then manually 
(outside Tbird) remove the file and replace it with a link to /dev/null.

But I do curate my filter settings. I run Tbird on four systems: two 
desktops and two laptops. One desktop is running all the time, with 
Tbird open all the time, polling the accounts at varying intervals. They 
have different filters because I'm too lazy to do the necessary copy and 
update of them all; the permanent desktop is the master but I 
occasionally update a filter or add a new one on one of the other machines.

Tbird keeps its spam settings in 
~/.thunderbird/xxxxx.default-release/training.dat and there is a Java 
utility called Bayes Junk Tool, which came from the now defunct mozdev 
site. This merges two training.dat files and outputs a new one, 
eliminating duplicates, eg

$ java -jar ~/wherever/bayesjunktool-0.2.1.jar -i training-1.dat -m 
training-2.dat -o training-new.dat -f data

So a couple of times a year I perform a multipass merge on my four 
training.dat files, and replace them all with the updated copy.

It's a minimal amount of work, and so far I'm happy with it. I can then 
move all the contents of spam folders to Trash, where they all get 
deleted according to schedule.

And I also have mutt for fixing stray out-of-thread messages :-)

Peter