[Spambayes] Re: Cool feature...

[Seth Goodman]

> From: Tony Meyer
> Sent: Monday, December 20, 2004 4:30 PM
>
>
> > I'm pretty sure I've seen at
> > least one Outlook spam filter (iHateSpam maybe?) that can tag
> > messages with a category.
>
> I don't have 2003, so that's probably why I'm not familiar with
> them.  Would such tagging be useful for SpamBayes?  It would be
> simple to do.

I use Outlook2000 and it supports Categories.  I happen to use it to
implement a whitelist rule that automatically sends notification to
Brightmail when they misclassify a message.  This rule has no effect on
Spambayes, as I prefer to let Spambayes see all the spam and thus do its job
properly, which it does.

The only possible benefit that I can see is that if you did mark a message
as one of three categories, in addition to making the spam score visible as
a user parameter, you could write Outlook rules to move classified messages,
instead of that having to be part of Spambayes.  This would conflict with
the delay needed to allow other rules to complete, so perhaps it isn't
really worthwhile.

Here's something related that I do think might be useful for Spambayes,
though harder to do.  TechHit has several Outlook plug-ins that can run as a
custom action in a rule, and thus can be placed in their proper place in the
rule hierarchy.  I don't know what they do to accomplish this, but it does
work as advertised.  This would get around the need for filter delays, as
the Outlook rules for a given new message are handled in order, even if they
make it impossible for something that operates outside the rule system to
intervene properly.

Here's their website:  http://techhit.com/.  Take a look at their AutoRead
utility.  I really have no idea how they get their mitts on the required
info inside Outlook, but it's impressive.

--

Seth Goodman