On Jul 7, 2005, at 11:55 AM, John Bucy wrote:
Has anyone thought about having imapd initiate spam filter training? This would probably be a lot nicer for end users of the mail system rather than some of the alternatives -- forwarding misclassified mails somewhere, running something from cron, going to some web-based thing, etc.
what most server admins are doing now, and how i set up one of my ISP clients, is to tell users to create two folders, one called "this-is- spam" and one called "this-is-not-spam". anything which is classified incorrectly, the user drops into the appropriate folder. once an hour (or whenever appropriate) the server runs a cron job which scans these folders, feeds the messages to the manual training program for their filtering system, and deletes them from the folder (so the user knows that they have been handled.)
of course this only works for users who use IMAP to begin with- most ISP's either have the "clueless" kind of user who doesn't understand anything more complicated than POP3 (i.e. "huh? folders on the server?") or who have space-hogs who, if they have the option to store folders on the server, would save every message and quickly exhaust their quota without realizing it- then get upset and start wasting your tech support guys' time when incoming mail stops arriving the way they think it should.
what i could see as a handy feature for an IMAP server would be a per- mailbox flag which would prevent IMAP clients from being able to create, delete, or rename folders. the user would still be able to work with messages normally, including copying messages from one folder to another, but because they cannot create new folders, the temptation to start an archive on the server would be gone. the ISP would create each user's folder structure when the account is created (including spam training folders if needed) and the user would be stuck with this exact set of folders.
THIS would be a strong enough feature for me to switch this ISP (my client) from courier-imap to binc, along with my own server.
-------------------------------------------------- | John M. Simpson - KG4ZOW - Programmer At Large | | http://www.jms1.net/ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | -------------------------------------------------- | Mac OS X proves that it's easier to make UNIX | | pretty than it is to make Windows secure. | --------------------------------------------------
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