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

[Richie Hindle]

Hi Robin,

> I'm offering my services to write client integration code or documentation.

Great!  I'd love to see some <pointyhair> productization </pointyhair> done
- the code is fantastically good at what it does, and opening it up to a
wider audience by making it more accessible to end users would be great.

The part of the project that I'm responsible for is pop3proxy.py, which
sits between an email client and a POP3 server and adds a spam-judgement
header to each email as it comes through.  You can then set up your email
client to filter/highlight/delete/whatever on that header.  It's not as
integrated as Mark's Outlook stuff, but it works with any email client on
any platform (and with the proxy and the client on different platforms,
should you wish).

The missing pieces are:

 o A user interface
 o An easier way of training it
 o A way of installing it
 o A fix for the bug that's preventing it from working on Linux - this
   is on its way!
 o A more sensible header than 'X-Hammie-Disposition' - I agree with
   whoever said that we need a better name.

My prefered user interface to the proxy would be presented in HTML and
served by the proxy itself - platform independent, no GUI toolkits, no
deployment hassles, as pretty as you like.  Similar to Zoe
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/zoe) - either your point your browser at
it explicitly, or it launches a browser pointing at itself on startup
(except that unlike Zoe, this feature would work 8-).  I'm partway towards
having a toolkit that makes this easy.

The only non-techie way of training it that I've come up with so far (and
David Priest independently came up with the same idea, so it can't be all
bad) is to make it an SMTP proxy as well, and to return all spams to a
special 'spam' address which triggers it to train on the message rather
than forward it on.  Messages that weren't returned would be assumed to be
ham after some delay had passed, or after some spam was forwarded (proving
that the user hadn't just gone on holiday or something).  After a little
while it would get most messages right, and you'd only have to forward the
odd misclassified message back to it.

All that said, the fact that this Linux pop3proxy bug has only just cropped
up means that not many people have tried it - is that because everyone here
is in charge of their own mail delivery system and is therefore using
hammie, or because the whole idea is unattractive?

-- 
Richie Hindle
richie@entrian.com