On 2005-05-27, Stephen Warren penned: > confirmation request. > > However, if you're going to do this, then why use TMDA at all?
As someone who does this, perhaps I can answer. Primarily, I do it because the filtering rules are easy to write, so I don't worry about accidentally clobbering good email. For example, headers 'X-Spam-Flag: YES' deliver=~/mail/spam Very clean and easy to remember. Others might like using keyword or dated addresses, which tmda also provides. > Every user is going to have to check the pending list as often as they > check their email, to see if somebody new has sent email, and then > decide for each email if they actually want to read it or not, except > that to decide that, they've already read it in the pending queue! I guess it depends on the environment. The vast majority of emails I receive have some known characteristic -- a list ID, a term, or an email address. I would only have to check the pending queue as frequently as you suggest if my mail had a 50/50 chance of being both important and not in my filter rules, which simply isn't the case for me. However, I choose to have a cron job notify me of the contents of the pending queue now and then, just to see if there's anything I care about. It's actually pretty rare that I get spam that's not caught by one of my rules, including of course the SA flag rule. To me, what's important is that when I get a new message in my inbox, I know it's good. I hate seeing a "Bell in screen 4" message or whatever, thinking it might be good stuff, switching over and seeing that, ugh, it's actually spam. Elevates my blood pressure instantly. There are certain groups who can't afford to risk losing contacts. It's a simple fact that some people won't bother with a C/R message, and others won't understand it. So if you're a business counting on email from unknown parties, or if you're looking for work and expect email from a variety of employment sources, C/R has the potential to alienate people you can't afford to alienate. Or simply losing a potentially useful message from an automated system whose address you didn't anticipate. The reality, however, is that TMDA is much more than just a C/R system. It allows filtering rules. It is a perfectly usable system without C/R. In fact, I remember Jason musing about whether to make the default action "HOLD" for new installations, just to give people a chance to set everything up properly before making the C/R portion "live." In short, the great thing about TMDA is that, like any good tool, it can be used in a variety of ways. It may not suit your purpose, but that doesn't mean it's pointless to other people. -- monique Ask smart questions, get good answers: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html _____________________________________________ tmda-users mailing list ([email protected]) http://tmda.net/lists/listinfo/tmda-users
