[Spambayes] Pop3proxy training suddenly quit working - pop3proxy is incompatible with fetchmail!

[David Handy]

I found the cause of the problem - pop3proxy is incompatible with 
fetchmail!

The reason that pop3proxy message caching and training quit working for me 
on July 18 is because that is the day I quit retrieving my mail via POP 
directly from a MUA (Evolution in my case) and switched to having 
fetchmail do the POP retrieval.

By turning on the [globals] verbose flag I was able to find out that 
fetchmail does a "TOP 1 99999999" POP command instead of a "RETR" command 
to bring down a message.

Furthermore, in pop3proxy.py, class BayesProxy, method onRetr(), line 
439 in the 1.0a4 version, the code that actually moves the message into 
the cache is gated by the following statement:

    if command == 'RETR':

I verified that in the case of fetchmail bringing down the mail, onRetr() 
is called with command == 'TOP'. So that "if" statement effectively 
prevents caching and training of messages for everyone using fetchmail.

I'm surprised this one wasn't caught earlier.

I can hack around this for my own use by perhaps changing the "if" 
statement to look like:

    if command == 'RETR' or command == 'TOP':

but I wouldn't advise this for general use until I understood why that 
"if" statement was there in the first place. Perhaps it was felt that MUA's 
would do a TOP command that wouldn't bring down enough lines to classify 
the message well enough. In that case we could check the parameters of the 
TOP command to see if it is being used to effectively bring down the whole 
message, like fetchmail does.


On Sat, 26 Jul 2003, Richie Hindle wrote:

> 
> [David]
> > I was minding my own business happily using spambayes 1.0a2 pop3proxy and 
> > having good results with it, when one day (July 18) message caching and 
> > training quit working.
> > 
> > Any ideas or suggestions?
> 
> Bizarre.  Try moving aside your .ini file and restarting - do the default
> settings work?
> 
>