Paul Boven wrote:
Hi Kevin, everyone,
I agree that this would be difficult, but right now we're all facing that difficulty on our own, so to speak. A more comprehensive Wiki would help, but my goal is to find a way of doing this that is independent of the rest of the mail-system, and can then become an integral part of SA.
Any suggestions on how to do this? One of SA's strengths is that it is designed to be a module that can be plugged into a larger mail flow environment rather than acting as a monolithic application. I think that any attempt to create a manual training method that suits every environment is doomed to failure.
The current system works well if your mailbox is on the system where you run SpamAssassin and you can retrain from the commandline. That's only a small subset of all email-users though. Once the setup gets a bit more complicated, involves IMAP servers, forwarding etc., you get in trouble.
You've just pointed out yourself why it is next to impossible for SA to associate a unique identification code to a specific email such that it will always be able to recognize that email in the future. SA has no control nor knowledge of what happens to the email after it has scanned it, and it can be altered in numerous ways. So again, do you have any better suggestions? As I said in my original email, any attempt to create a better means of identifying emails would need to be rigorously tested before it could be shown to actually be better than what SA already has.
It is a fine thing to demonstrate weaknesses in a product. It's a much better thing to suggest ways to improve it. Your suggestion to weigh manually learned emails heavier than autolearned ones is a good start.
