[spambayes-dev] I took a big step Tuesday...

[T. Alexander Popiel]

In message:  <16160.3822.417420.396394 at montanaro.dyndns.org>
             Skip Montanaro <skip at pobox.com> writes:
>
>The reason I was ruminating about something within Spambayes is that it's
>not clear that most people will have a non-Spambayes way of dealing with
>such issues.

Aye... I guess part of the question is whether the current stuff
we've got is "good enough" for the target audience of Tim's sisters,
and whether any additional complication would merely confuse them
and lead them into unhappy errors.  I tend to think that those
people with the appropriate level of concern to properly handle
a 'super-spam' category (with all the caveats of "not until enough
training", "likely fooled by receipts from new business partners",
etc.) will also have the ability to use a non-spambayes tool, too.

>For example, the order in which various filters are applied
>within Outlook seems somewhat non-deterministic, so it's possible that SB
>marking a message 1.00 will not necessarily be caught by a later
>user-defined Outlook filter designed to delete such messages.

from rant import bad_tool as Outlook

I seem to recall from various other threads that you can't make
an Outlook rule to automatically delete mail, anyway.

>Maybe I'm completely mistaken and most mail user agents now have
>sufficiently sophisticated rules or filters to allow headers which match
>"spam; 1.00" to be deleted automatically.

I contend instead that most people concerned enough with the issue to
care have migrated to MTAs or MDAs capable of handling sufficiently
sophisticated rules, regardless of their MUA choice.  Almost everyone
I know has either procmail or slocal as MDA, either of which will work
well.  Perhaps I'm biased by knowing primarily people running unix or
linux systems, with the couple holdouts running NT having worked with
me at a company specializing in MTAs.

>Maybe it's just something we should document in the FAQ.  There is question
>3.10, but it's specific to Outlook.

This seems reasonable.

- Alex