Failsafe (was Re: [Spambayes] Does anyone care about this report?)

[Abhay Saxena]

On Wednesday, May 14, 2003, at 04:51  PM, T. Alexander Popiel wrote:
> [...] The failsafe nature is not really obvious.  For the first part, 
> standard procmail holds that if a filter (and I'm using spambayes as a 
> filter) exits with a non-zero exit code, then the original mail is 
> retained instead of the filtered version.

Ah, that was the part I needed to know. Thanks.

So now that I'm not worried about losing email to Spambayes crashes, 
the only thing I really have to worry about is malformed messages 
(which cause hammiefilter.py to output what is essentially an empty 
message).

I don't suppose we can assume that hammiefilter.py should always output 
something bigger than its input, since minor whitespace shuffling or 
whatever might decrease the size of a large message more than adding a 
header increases it. But can we somehow notice when hammiefilter.py 
significantly reduces the size of a message (say by 10% or more) and 
fall back to the original in that case? I'm not sure whether this is 
something we want to do in Python or Procmail (for those of us using 
Procmail).

   - Abhay