[Spambayes] Question : rules for multiple users

[Richie Hindle]

Hi Luca,

> As a system admin, I am planning to set up
> a spambayes pop3proxy for my organization.
> So, many users will redirect their mail client
> to the pop3proxy listener.
> 
> There's one thing I am not understanding.
> Does any user need to train the proxy by himself
> with his own rules for spam?
> Or is it possible to define global rules, valid for
> all users?
> Are the rules individual, global, or is it possible
> to define rules of both categories?

If all your users share the same instance of the proxy, then they all
share a training database.  The same rules will apply to all of them.

This is a mixed blessing; the database will be trained very quickly, and
on the whole the system will work well for a bunch of people whose use of
email tends to be quite similar (eg. if the vast majority of legitimate
email is work-related, and they work in similar jobs).

On the other hand, if they all subscribe to a wide variety of mailing
lists, their training efforts will at best dilute each other, and at worst
contradict each other.  Imagine a doctor working with sexual problems, vs.
a banker working with African investments.  Words like Viagra, Erection,
Nigeria and Fund Transfer will be trained in very different ways by the
two of them.  Spambayes is really intended to be used in a single-user
environment (or in a multi-user environment by giving each user their own
instance of the proxy, which is just another way of saying the same
thing).  To my knowledge, no-one has made a scientific study of how well
it performs in a multi-user environment vs. the equivalent single-user
environments.  My gut feeling is that it will perform merely extremely
well, instead of astonishingly well.  8-)

The other caveat with multiple users using the same proxy is that they
will be able to read each other's emails, because the training interface
lets you read the emails that are awaiting training.

-- 
Richie Hindle
richie at entrian.com