[Spambayes] SpamBayes questions

[Skip Montanaro]

    Neville> I think you are missing my main point and that is to enable the
    Neville> option of not downloading spam at certain specific times, such
    Neville> as when I'm in a hotel paying exorbitant connection charges. As
    Neville> soon as I'm back in the office I'd disable this option and
    Neville> handle the spam as necessary.

I think I understood fairly well what you were asking.  I believe you were
asking about running the filter server side, then picking up your mail in
the usual fashion.  If you're talking to a vanilla POP server how do you
tell it to "not download spam at certain specific times"?  Can this be
accomplished with more control over the tool chain?  Yes. You mentioned the
possibility of modifying pop3proxy to listen to port 111 as well as port
110, with connections to the former hiding possible spam messages.  I'm not
sure I'd trust garden variety users to toggle their POP port reliably.  Some
email clients (like Eudora), only allow you to set a single POP port used to
connect to all possible POP servers, so if you have multiple POP drops you'd
be scrod.  (The dual port solution also seems like a gross hack.  If you're
going to use pop3proxy to do your bidding, it would better to simply have a
"hide_spam_temporarily" flag.)

    Neville> That said if SpamBayes is running remotely with my mail server
    Neville> and the day comes that I'm confident SB "never or rarely" comes
    Neville> up with false positives, then I may be quite happy for SB to
    Neville> delete everything it recognizes as spam so I don't have to
    Neville> waist precious time checking and deleting it.

Please, no.  SpamAssassin also only filters messages.  I recall seeing it
slammed in public forums because some system managers got the bright idea to
configure the downstream procmail to delete messages whose scores were "high
enough".  Naturally enough, SA got blamed.  While we can't prevent sys
admins from hanging themselves, we ought to at least make them build the
gallows and buy the rope.

    Neville> Finally I control all of my email accounts, mail sever, web
    Neville> server etc. and know precisely what I am doing, so the mail
    Neville> server quota issue etc. wouldn't become an issue. If I were
    Neville> looking after email for "other" users things may be different.

Yeah, I control everything about my email account as well.  You and I are
likely not to be garden variety users though.  I've also been using
SpamBayes longer than most people on this list.  I still don't delete *any*
spams.  (I do encounter false positives, though they are rare.)  Messages
classified as spam get tossed into two mailboxes by procmail, one for those
with a score of 0.99 or 1.00, and all others which exceed my spam_cutoff
(around 0.88).  The only practical difference is the "high spam" mail gets
scanned less frequently and more quickly.

    Neville> The idea of having separate ports to access spam, ham etc. as I
    Neville> suggested and Tony Meyer's has discussed appears to be a simple
    Neville> enough way to achieve this and doesn't require separate
    Neville> mailboxes.

See my comment above about what normal users are capable of.

Skip