From: "Loren Wilton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > I was thinking, would it be feasible to have an option for spamassassin
> > to exit after a message reached the spam threshold?
>
> This gets discussed periodically, and I think there may be a bugzilla
ticket
> open on it as an enhamcement request.
>
> It seems there are some implementation annoyances with actually making
> something like this work. Like network tests, which are started early but
> may not come in until very late. And Bayes, which can have a positive or
> negative score. And there are some pathelogical possible cases, like
having
> to run rules that are in metas before the metas can run, so you could
> potentially get a lot of high-scoring rules before they are negated by a
> negative-scoring meta.
>
> I personally don't see any of these objections as really serious problems.
> But then, I'm not a dev, so there are things I could be missing. It
> certainly is something that would take a little serious thought to make
sure
> that the rule ordering was correct, and you didn't end up bailing too
early.
> And that the cost of rule ordering didn't exceed the cost of simply
running
> all of the rules and looking at the final total!
>
> It isn't clear that you can completely precompute the evaluation order,
> since user rule files can change scores on rules, and users can
(sometimes)
> also have rules of their own. You would potentially have to compute a
graph
> for each user, and somehow detect when the user's rules or scores have
> changed and you need to recompute the graph.
>
> Of course, one way of doing this would be to have a graph compiler that
you
> were required to run after making rule or score changes. This would be an
> annoyance, but I don't know that it would be completely unacceptable.
I think the old argument was that some scores are positive and some scores
are negative. They are not sorted by magnitude of score and then applied.
So you can add up quite a score and discover another score in the pipeline
that reduces the message back out of spam range. (Suppose you elected to
give this list a huge negative score after the Apache sysadmin taught the
emails for this list to bypass his silly antispam filter upon realizing
that spam is food for this list. It was fun to see the occasional spam
that seemed to hit every rule in the book to run up a HUGE score on low
scoring rules. If that negative score was applied as one of the last
rules the early drop out would get missed and you'd have to do something
else to get the email from this list.)
{^_^}
