[Spambayes] Re: Practical Applications

[Richie Hindle]

Anthony,

> I'd suggest an alternate approach - 
> - for the inbound, something like pop3proxy.py, but it should also
> keep a copy of (some/all) messages as 'ham' samples.
> 
> - for marking as spam, a small application (maybe in VBA) that
> copies the current message into a magic location on disk.

Also in the "Random thoughts before the first coffee" category is this:
for email clients to which you can't add such a function, we could make
pop3proxy into an SMTP proxy for outgoing mail and define an email address
'spam' to which you bulk-forward spams.  The proxy would retrain on those
messages, and not forward them on to the mail server.

My email client (not sure about others) lets me forward a batch of
messages together, so it would only be a couple of keystrokes and would
work on all platforms without need to plug into the email clients.  It
also means you don't need to explicitly run the classifier, or schedule it
to run regularly, to retrain it on new spams.

The biggest problem with either scheme is which mails you can assume are
ham - you should really have to hit a copy-to-ham-folder button or forward
them to a 'ham' address in order to guarantee that no spam gets filed as
ham (looking through the past messages I can't see a previous discussion
on this, but I'm sure there was one - the phrase 'auto-ham' is buzzing
round my head.  Probably a pre-coffee problem.)

-- 
Richie Hindle
richie@entrian.com