> On July 8, 2002 at 11:05, Jon Steinhart wrote: > > > And I agree, downloading the entire message is the way to go. Most spam is > > very small compared to even slow V90 speeds which is what I'm stuck with out > > in the country here, so it's no big deal. > > Well, I would have to disagree about spam being small and no big deal > over V90 modem. Spam messages have been increasing in size since many > are HTML messages and some with attachments or images. Also, if you > are flooded with alot of messages, they add up. > > Of course, the annoyance factor is relative for any given person, but > when I was using dialup, I definitely considered writing my own > POP filtering tool with interactive capabilities to avoid downloading > crap (and sometimes the messages may not be spam but from friends and/or > relatives sending huge-assed attachments that I did not care about). > > However, once I got cable modem, my need for such a tool dropped > considerably. > > > A side note: I considering spam filtering, and other filtering needs, > mainly delivery issue. Hence, I think it is best solved done before > nmh even sees the mail (the boundary is somewhat lose when dealing > with automatic filing of messages to different folders). This keeps > the filtering job independent of the MUA and prevent developers > re-implementing the wheel for every MUA. > > > I have a set of changes that I'll submit at an appropriate time. > > These changes allow .mh_profile entries that name programs that are > > executed whenever a piece of mail is incorporated, removed, or refiled. > > A nice feature. > > --ewh
This has the potential to go way off topic for this mailing list, but... I agree that a fair number of bytes are consumed by spam. It isn't a huge problem for me because even though V90 is the best that I can do out here in the sticks, it's a full time connection so I'm not waiting on mail delivery. I find it hard to see filtering as a delivery issue, but that's probably because I read my mail on my machine which uses sendmail to deliver mail; I'm not dialing in somewhere to pick up mail. If I need to read mail on the road, I ssh into my machine and read it there. The big issue on filtering is that everybody wants to filter different things. Strange as it seems, some people even like to collect spam for study. One of the big difficult issues on filtering is that, while an occasional false positive can be tolerated, false negatives are completely unacceptable. A system that keeps all of your mail and only shows you interesting messages doesn't lose anything, which helps that problem. But it requires sucking down all messages. Another example, I remember Gosling telling me that especially since he's become embroiled in the Sun/MS suits that a mirror copy of all of his incoming and outgoing mail is kept for legal reasons. This wouldn't work if incoming mail was rejected based on headers. Jon
