[Spambayes] Whitelisting for spam reports

[Manuel Hewitt]

Hallo Bob,

Am Samstag, 15. Oktober 2005 hast du geschrieben:

> The idea isn't to intercept the messages on the server; it's to
> intercept them on the client before they're dumped into your inbox. The
> theory is that most mail clients will run their own classification rules
> on incoming messages before making them available to Spambayes. Outlook
> doesn't, which is why the Outlook version of Spambayes allows you to
> delay application of its clasification rules until (one hopes) Outlook
> is finished.

Maybe it's my bad english, but i don't understand this.
To use Spambayes as a enduser there is only the pop3proxy, the
imapfilter and the Outlook plugin. I don't use Outlook or IMAP, so the
only possibility is to use the pop3proxy.
Every email i get will be processed by Spambayes and i see no way around
it.
And i esp. don't understand:

> The
> theory is that most mail clients will run their own classification rules
> on incoming messages before making them available to Spambayes.

Most email clients can only apply their classification _after_ the
emails were available to Spambayes. That is the way i understand the
concept of Spambayes.
To make it clear: My email client doesn't classify anything. The email
client has only to filter the emails according to the classification
done by Spambayes. It is no problem to sort the spamcop replies out,
because they can be recognized by their email address easily. But that
is not the point. The emails still went throught the classification
process of Spambayes. I can't train them as spam or ham, because they
are ham with spam content inside. This would only reduce the accuracy of
the rules. So the only possibility is to discard these messages, but
this is annoying because these emails will sometimes be classified as
ham, sometimes as spam and mostly as unsure.
The only way to handle these kind of emails cleanly without messing the
rules is simply to whitelist them.
I realize that an average user doesn't need whitelisting, but as soon as
get ham emails that are dealing with spam issues, this is an important
feature.

To comment the FAQ:
- as you can see, Spambayes needs in some cases a whitelist.
- in my case, spoofing has never been a problem.
- ignoring user requests is never a good idea
- and, frankly, it isn't hard to code a simple whitelist for a developer
that manages to deal with a program like Spambayes

The summary of that FAQ answer is simply "No, we don't want a whitelist
and we are not going to code one." I'd rather accept this answer instead
of the lengthy excuses.