On 21-Dec-06 Daniel Bauer wrote: > [...] > I am not at all an expert, but I dislike the option of > rejecting emails due to a blacklist. I prefer to have > spam in my spam-folder (after it has been marked by > Spam-Assassin), where I can quickly overview the subject > lines. > [...] > Using blacklists for warning/marking purposes seems ok > to me, but letting a blacklist make decisions can be > dangerous. Just my opinion. > > Daniel
I've been reading this discussion--technicalities and conflicts of automated spam-filtering--and welcome Daniel's common-sense approach. I was going to write, anyway, that the very best filter for unwanted mail is yourself. The real issue is how you implement that filter. In my case, I have mail delivered to a different machine (call it "mailhost") to the one I actually handle mail on (call it "mailagent"). Logged in to mailhost, I open my inbox with good old fast and compact 'elm'. This displays a text window with 1 line per mail, showing sender and subject for each mail. Then, with one finger on "D" (delete) and one on "J" (skip down one line), I can work through the bunch of delivered mail very quickly indeed--the decision to "D" (get rid of it) and "J" (keep it) is made in a fraction of a second, and I can work through 100 mails in perhaps a minute. Then quit 'elm', confirming deletions and keep-in-inbox in the process. Any slips of the fingers can be rectified with "Shift-K" (move up 1 regardless of status) and "U" (undelete), though I don't often need that. Having done that, I then use POP3 retrieval to bring the remainder over to mailagent, where can deal with it normally using a mail client (XFMail). The advantage of this approach is that not only spam (which one can almost always easily recognise from Sender and Subject) but also mails from mailing-lists on topics one doesn't want to read about, etc., are handled all in one go. if there's any doubt, then pressing the spacebar in 'elm' shows you the body, so you can then definitively decide. Being eing 'elm', it's very fast. And, being you, it's as fast as you can be and also flexible, discriminating and accurate. Doing this in the MUA (XFMail) would be more tedious, because it's GUI-based, so you waste ages moving and clocking the mouse! I get on average about 500 mails a day, of which about 2/3 is spam, and most of the rest is not interesting, so I only retrieve some 5-15% for further consideration. False negatives (retrieving mail I don't really want) are unusual, and false positives (deleting mail I do want) are very rare. I reckon that, with the 500 or so per day, dealing with spam and unwanted mail in this way probably takes 5-10 minutes in total. By the way, you don't need to use two machines for the above (depending on your MUA). XFMail stores mail in MH folders, one of which is "inbox", so doesn't directly deal with the user's system mailbox /var/spool/mail/user except when pulling mail. So with an MUA which works that way, you could use 'elm' on the inbox as above. But if your MUA's inbox is the user's system mailbox, you may find that the MUA puts a lock on it. Best wishes, and Season's Greetings to all! Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 21-Dec-06 Time: 11:36:42 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
