[Spambayes] Email client integration -- what's needed?

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 05:05 PM 11/1/02 -0500, Tim Peters wrote:

>Yup!  Thanks to Sean and especially Mark lately, the non-Windows platforms
>are a month behind on that too.  It's a curious thing about Windows:
>because it is closed-source, the Windows market is homogenous enough that
>one major effort there can make millions of happy campers.  I still hope
>that the pop3proxy can do that for non-Windows systems too, and that's the
>only advice I can offer:  find a way to use the proxy instead of pursuing
>"deep integration" with unbounded dozens of quirky twenty-user email
>clients.

And perhaps the proxy could include a web GUI to handle its other UI 
requirements.

The proxy could keep a history of "recently received" messages, along with 
their ham/spam/unsure status.  It would only permit downloading of ham 
messages, keeping the rest to itself.  Periodically, it would drop in a 
"unsure and spam summary" message that included the list of unsures 
followed by the spams, with a link to the web training UI.

The UI would let you inspect messages and mark them as ham or spam, and 
also allow you to go back and mark false negatives as spam, doing the 
necessary unlearning or relearning as needed.  By default, it would train 
itself on all "sure" messages, ham or spam.

This approach would ensure that the "right" training procedure gets 
followed, while keeping spam from ever entering the mail client.  If the 
installation procedure set up a desktop icon (or local platform equivalent 
thereof) to launch the Web UI, and set up the POP-proxy/webserver to run 
continuously or start-on-demand, the result could be "easy enough" for most 
people.

I think the POPFile (http://popfile.sf.net/) people are taking a similar 
approach to their Bayesian filtering proxy, complete with step-by-step 
screenshots of how to configure Outlook, Eudora, and Outlook Express to use 
their proxy.

One nice thing about the proxy approach is that a company could easily 
offer this as a commercial service, that would let you set up your home and 
office mail clients to pick up from the proxy, so you wouldn't have to 
train your filter in more than one place.  Of course, for such a service to 
work, it'd probably have to support some kind of SMTP proxying as well, 
since so many SMTP servers require POP-before-SMTP.  Hm.