[Spambayes] pop3/smtp proxy with Outlook/Outlook Express (bug?)

Austine Jane janeaustine50 at hotmail.com
Fri Sep 26 09:18:35 EDT 2003


>From: "Meyer, Tony" <T.A.Meyer at massey.ac.nz>
>To: "Austine Jane" <janeaustine50 at hotmail.com>, <spambayes at python.org>
>Subject: RE: [Spambayes] pop3/smtp proxy with Outlook/Outlook Express
>Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2003 16:31:02 +1200
>
>[Using smtp proxy doesn't update the review messages page with OE]
> > Is it because OE removes special message headers like message id?
>
>The way the smtp proxy works, ideally, is to have a special spambayes id
>forwarded to it, which it uses to find a cached copy of the message.
>This means that it trains on the exact message that arrived, ignoring
>anything that the mail program (OE, here) may have done to it.  In order
>for this to work, the mail program has to forward on all the headers in
>the original message (because that's where the spambayes id is).  OE
>will not do this; it won't even display them.
>
>This means that the only way to use the smtp proxy with OE is to train
>on the exact message that is forwarded - but this is a *bad* idea.  The
>messages will have changed - many headers will be missing, for example,
>and the message will be from *you*, not the original sender.  It also
>means that the message can't be removed from the 'unknown' cache,
>because spambayes can't identify which message it was.

I have looked into sb_smtpproxy.py source code, and found that the proxy 
examines the body part of email as well to find cached mail id. So I copied 
the original spambayes headers into the body and forwarded to the smtp 
proxy. It seemed to be working. "Could not extract id" message is not shown 
anymore. In the train_cached_message method, however, the if-statement 
prints "Could not find message...perhaps it was deleted..." (actually, I had 
to modify that line so that the strings are  concatenated first due to the 
TypeError: not all arguments converted during string formatting -- a bug.)

What's going on?

>
>The good news is that soon(ish) you'll be able to train spambayes by
>moving messages into a folder inside Outlook Express, rather than having
>to use the web interface (although that will be available) or smtp
>proxy.  How soon depends on how busy I get ;)
>

Thank you!


Cheers,

Jane

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