Mailman 3 November 2002 - SpamBayes

Outlook Plugin crashes
by Steffen Siebert Nov. 27, 2002

Nov. 27, 2002

Hello, I'm trying to install the spambayes outlook plugin, but it crashes all the time (see traceback below). I'm using python 2.2.2 with win32all-150 under windows 2000. I've made some tests and to my astonishment it is possible to start manager.py from the commandline and it works fine! I suspected that outlook starts a different python, but I've deleted all other python.exe and python*.dll files from my machine and also modified manager.py to print the value of sys.version, it says its using the right version. I hope someone can help me here. Thanks in advance, Steffen Traceback: Outlook Spam Addin module loading SpamAddin - Connecting to Outlook Created new configuration file 'D:\spambayes\spambayes\Outlook2000\default_configuration.pck' Traceback (most recent call last): File "D:\Python22\lib\site-packages\win32com\universal.py", line 150, in dispatch retVal = ob._InvokeEx_(meth.dispid, 0, pythoncom.DISPATCH_METHOD, args, None, None) File "D:\Python22\lib\site-packages\win32com\server\policy.py", line 322, in _InvokeEx_ return self._invokeex_(dispid, lcid, wFlags, args, kwargs, serviceProvider) File "D:\Python22\lib\site-packages\win32com\server\policy.py", line 562, in _invokeex_ return DesignatedWrapPolicy._invokeex_( self, dispid, lcid, wFlags, args, kwArgs, serviceProvider) File "D:\Python22\lib\site-packages\win32com\server\policy.py", line 510, in _invokeex_ return apply(func, args) File "D:\spambayes\spambayes\Outlook2000\addin.py", line 538, in OnConnection self.manager = manager.GetManager(application) File "D:\spambayes\spambayes\Outlook2000\manager.py", line 317, in GetManager _mgr = BayesManager(outlook=outlook, verbose=verbose) File "D:\spambayes\spambayes\Outlook2000\manager.py", line 67, in __init__ import_core_spambayes_stuff(self.ini_filename) File "D:\spambayes\spambayes\Outlook2000\manager.py", line 41, in import_core_spambayes_stuff import classifier File "D:\spambayes\spambayes\classifier.py", line 37, in ? from Options import options File "D:\spambayes\spambayes\Options.py", line 512, in ? options.mergefilelike(d) File "D:\spambayes\spambayes\Options.py", line 479, in mergefilelike self._update() File "D:\spambayes\spambayes\Options.py", line 497, in _update value = getattr(c, fetcher)(section, option) File "D:\Python22\Lib\ConfigParser.py", line 306, in getfloat return self.__get(section, float, option) File "D:\Python22\Lib\ConfigParser.py", line 300, in __get return conv(self.get(section, option)) exceptions.ValueError: invalid literal for float(): 10.00

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can pop3proxy train on uploaded mbox?
by Skip Montanaro Nov. 27, 2002

Nov. 27, 2002

Can pop3proxy train on an mbox uploaded via the web interface or is that restricted to individual messages? Skip

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Bouncing Spam
by Tim Stone - Four Stones Expressions Nov. 27, 2002

Nov. 27, 2002

This is a bit off topic, but perhaps someone knows... Is it possible to return a mail in such a manner that it appears to the sender to have bounced? It'd be real nice to have a 'bounce' option for spam, so that the senders *might* take the address off their list, if they think it's a dead address... c'est moi - TimS www.fourstonesExpressions.com

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Re: [Spambayes] Bouncing Spam
by T. Alexander Popiel Nov. 27, 2002

Nov. 27, 2002

In message: <CAGGD76ZULJTSIGKGOL64CAZVUQ4WJD.3de4fa5e@riven> <tim(a)fourstonesExpressions.com> writes: >Well, ok then, the question arises as to whether or not spambayes should >offer some functionality that is integratable into MX agents, or an MX >agent proxy, or something like that, that is spambayes enabled, for >webmasters or others who administer such things... I certainly wouldn't >have the slightest idea how to make such a thing, but it seems reasonable. I personally wouldn't bother trying to integrate with existing mail transport agents (MTAs). They all have wildly different internal architectures, and several don't really have any 'plug-in' type interfaces. (This is speaking from my experience with sendmail, postfix, qmail, and exim.) Integrating with each MTA would be a separate task (just like building any of the client front-ends). Making a proxy MTA would be relatively easy (certainly easier than trying to integrate with other MTAs directly), but then you end up having much higher reliability standards to meet, and you have to deal with... umm... creative interpretations of SMTP. It's a can of worms that I wouldn't want to open. Finally, there's enough barriers against it actually being useful against the spammers (usually needing to decide to reject just based on the envelope from and to addresses, with no look at the full message (and thus no chance to correct false positives)) that it's IMHO not worth it. If you want to pursue this path despite the hazards and the low return, more power to you... - Alex

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RE: [Spambayes] Guidance re pickles versus DB for Outlook
by Moore, Paul Nov. 27, 2002

Nov. 27, 2002

From: Tim Stone - Four Stones Expressions > Ya, good thinking. It's a 350K binary, probably not a good candidate > for cvs. Being a neophyte to sf, I'll do some learning about the sf > files area. Where do you suggest I start? To be honest, I'm not sure. As I said, I'm not a SF developer for anything, and a brief look couldn't find anything useful on SF. Actually, going via www.python.org, and looking at the "Python Project" link in the left hand sidebar, I ended up finding http://sfdocs.sourceforge.net/. That looks like a useful place to start browsing. Hope this helps, Paul

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RE: [Spambayes] Guidance re pickles versus DB for Outlook
by Moore, Paul Nov. 27, 2002

Nov. 27, 2002

From: Tim Stone - Four Stones Expressions > Well, with Tim1's blessing, I'll give it another crack. Checking > in a firstcut simple pop3proxy install. If you're talking about a binary installer, you could upload it as a separate file into the Sourceforge files area. Dunno how easy this is (I've never used SF's developer facilities) but IIRC handling binary files in CVS can be a bit of a nightmare (not least the fact that changes result in a complete re-download as you can't send a patch for a binary file, not good if the file is big). Paul

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Re: [Spambayes] Introduction to list: Bill Yerazunis
by jm＠jmason.org Nov. 27, 2002

Nov. 27, 2002

(Hi Bill! Welcome to the de-facto-std anti-spam probability-combining-algorithm discussion forum ;) Tim Peters said: > I expect it's impossible to compare schemes convincingly without a shared > test set. We've got people here with very easy data, and with > excruciatingly difficult data, but for the most part only the spam is > sharable. My main test turned out to be on the easy end, and the ham in > that test consists of 20,000 msgs taken at random from a public archive of > comp.lang.python mailing-list traffic. In theory, anyone could use that > ham, but the spam has to be taken from a different source, and that creates > all sorts of problems of its own (there are too many clues in the headers > about the source of msgs to avoid getting great results for bad reasons, > unless great care is taken to blind the classifier to such clues). Reminder: http://SpamAssassin.org/publiccorpus/ has a public corpus of about 6200 mixed spam, "easy" ham and "hard" ham messages, all from the same source -- my own mail. (It's a bit small right now, but I do add to it occasionally as time goes on and I get a chance. Still, a reference 6k message corpus is more useful than a poke in the eye ;) --j.

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RE: [Spambayes] Re: Important information for Outlook users
by Moore, Paul Nov. 27, 2002

Nov. 27, 2002

From: Mark Hammond [mailto:mhammond@skippinet.com.au] > I'll try and get back to the meat of this later, but I saw Paul > mention her was fairly sure unregistering the addin had some effect. > > I am fairly certain that unregistering the adding will have zero > effect on any of the field workings. I was working from your comment that the addin works by playing with the field on the first message of a folder if it detects that the field is not present on startup. When I run the deletion script, this starts Outlook via COM. I was guessing that starting Outlook via COM loads the addin, which sees no field, so does its magic to create it, which the delete script then deletes. But I could very easily be wrong about this (I'm having a hard time this week recalling what day it is :-)) > Hope this makes some sense - well, as much sense to you as it does > to me <wink> Thanks. I think it does... Anyway, as this is basically only an issue in upgrading from the "old" field format to the "new" one, I decided to manually fix the Spam fields' format in the folders where it was wrong. All is now OK. Paul.

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RE: [Spambayes] Current version
by Moore, Paul Nov. 27, 2002

Nov. 27, 2002

From: Neale Pickett [mailto:neale@woozle.org] > So then, Paul Moore <lists(a)morpheus.demon.co.uk> is all like: > > > Patch to follow. Is a posting to the list OK, or should I upload it to > > SF? (No CVS commit ability, and I wouldn't know what to do if I had it > > :-)) > > Yep, patches on the list is fine. Post away! OK. Here's a patch. I've taken a simple approach to errors - if the user puts garbage into the option, the ImportError or AttributeError which gets generated is just passed back up the call stack. Maybe longer term we should look at error handling, but I can't find an example of recommended practice to steal :-) I tested it via the doctests and a bit of diagnostic printing. I'm taking the view that if I can create a DBDict successfully, if the code that uses it doesn't work, I never touched the interface :-) [I'll do some better testing tonight, when I'm back to my POP3 system, rather than Exchange...] Paul. PS Actually, there's another issue with this - it opens up a massive security hole, as the user can arrange for an arbitrary module to be imported - and an arbitrary function within that module to be run - by changing the INI file. This is not good. But I can't think how we could avoid this without removing the ability to choose a DBM implementation... PPS The doctests in dbdict.py need fixing - I'll update them in a separate patch once this one has been sorted out. Also, the iterskip argument is no longer needed/used. Should it go?

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Introduction to list: Bill Yerazunis
by Bill Yerazunis Nov. 27, 2002

Nov. 27, 2002

I should post an introduction for myself. I'm Bill Yerazunis, and I'm doing spamfiltering. Robert Woodhead and Paul Graham sent me. I wrote CRM114 (which hashes phrases as "features" and does Bayesian chain-rule evaluation), it seems to work well for me but I hear that some folks here had big problems with it. Anyway... good morning. -Bill Yerazunis

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