[spambayes-dev] Outlook Express and other 'dumb' clients

[Meyer, Tony]

The "Tim's sister" metric has recently become a little more important to me, since my fiancé wants to use a spam filter, and she has similar usage patterns as the described sisters.  Annoyingly, she's using Outlook Express, which, although it works with pop3proxy, isn't anywhere as nice as other solutions (e.g. the Outlook plugin and some of the hammie solutions).

I had a thought about how to make things easier, and wanted to run it past the list first, in case there are glaring problems that I'm overlooking, since it'll be a bit of coding to get it to work.

There are two thoughts, really.  The first is to write a script like mboxtrain that will take OE mbx/dbx files.  I *think* that this shouldn't be too tricky if I piggyback off other projects.  It doesn't really help that much, but it would be a start.

An alternative (this is the main idea) is to run a (local) IMAP server.  OE works fine with IMAP, so you could connect to the Spambayes IMAP server as well as whatever normal POP3/IMAP/Hotmail connections you already have.  The server would have two folders - "train as ham" and "train as spam".

The idea would be that you use the "copy to folder" option to move messages to one of those two folders, and can train that way.  You'd still use imapfilter/pop3proxy for classification purposes.  You could actually just move spam, rather than copy it.

This has the advantage of not having to use the browser to train, and is more intuitive (I think) than the forward/bounce method of smtpproxy (which doesn't work well with OE, anyway).

Thoughts?

=Tony Meyer