[Spambayes] Re: SpamBayes Readme

[Richard Jones]

On Tue, 19 Aug 2003 05:38 pm, Meyer, Tony wrote:
> > I suggest the following approach. Move the current README
> > aside and create a new one. It can just have the section
> > headings in there initially, then people can write sections
> > as they go. The current approach of hoping for
> > someone to come along and rewrite it all isn't working.
>
> That's probably right.  However, I couldn't be bothered creating
> appropriate headings, so I've created a new version.
>
> It's here at the moment:
> <http://www.massey.ac.nz/~tameyer/readme.txt>
>
> Comments?  Or should I just check this in?  I'll create a
> "readme-devel.txt" file that has all the testing (etc) info that the old
> readme had.

That's a huge improvement for new users over the existing readme! Especially 
the Really Impatient part, which gives the immediate impression that the 
software is easy to use. Then the most common use-cases are laid out straight 
away in a clear and concise manner. I'm a little bemused by your having 
"everyone else" before "procmail filtering" though :)

No mention of setup.py ... is it supposed to be used at all? If it is, I 
suggest that the scripts be renamed to make them a little more SB-specific 
(eg. "sb-pop3proxy"), as on my system it installs them all to /usr/bin (as I 
used /usr/bin/python2.3 to install them).

Running pop3proxy.py, the first problem is that the webbrowser module is 
b0rken for me... I've posted a patch to Python bug 687747 which consists of:

--- webbrowser.py       2003-08-20 10:28:07.000000000 +1000
+++ /usr/lib/python2.3/webbrowser.py    2003-08-04 10:18:17.000000000 +1000
@@ -354,7 +354,7 @@
 if "BROWSER" in os.environ:
     # It's the user's responsibility to register handlers for any unknown
     # browser referenced by this value, before calling open().
-    _tryorder[0:0] = os.environ["BROWSER"].split(os.pathsep)
+    _tryorder = os.environ["BROWSER"].split(os.pathsep)

 for cmd in _tryorder:
     if not cmd.lower() in _browsers:

[might be useful for your later reference if the problem pops up]

After I fixed that, the web interface came up nicely. I then tried to set up a 
proxy for my main email account. I stupidly put in "110" as the port number 
(having not read the instructions fully, I thought I a was entering the port 
number for the target pop server, not the local port), and promptly got an 
error and a whole slew of output to the console pop3proxy was running in 
consisting of a constant stream of:

warning: unhandled read event
warning: unhandled write event

Ehem. So, I need to choose a port number above 1024 there :)


In response to Skip's question, I'm running KMail to two POP servers and one 
IMAP server (I also use the OSX Mail.app to read the IMAP box). I now know 
that setting up the spambayes for the POP server will be a breeze. The IMAP 
box is already spam-filtered (poorly) by Mail.app. Getting the POP accounts 
spam-filtered will be a big win for now.

Also on this note, I've previously used spamassasin through kmail's filtering 
(invoking the command-line tool from a filter). I think that the procmail 
setup could be adapted to do this, but training is an issue.

BTW, I don't even know what format my mail is stored in by KMail (I suggest 
that a lot of users wouldn't know this :). I do know it's not mailbox format. 
It looks like a directory per folder, with "cur", "new" and "tmp" for each, 
and then a file per message. *shrug*

Also, I had a look in the FAQ, but I couldn't see any reference to starting 
spambayes on boot-time. Has any work been done on some sort of rc script?


   Richard
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