[Spambayes] Suggestion/Help offer

[Dejonghe, Manuel]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dave Hall [mailto:dave at dnh.sk.ca] 
> Sent: Samstag, 18. Oktober 2003 02:25
> To: spambayes at python.org
> Subject: Re: [Spambayes] Suggestion/Help offer
> 
> On Sat, Oct 18, 2003 at 01:56:07AM +0200, Dejonghe, Manuel wrote:
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: Craig Bateman [mailto:cbateman at lmltechnologies.com] 
> > > Sent: Samstag, 18. Oktober 2003 00:07
> > > To: spambayes at python.org
> > > Subject: [Spambayes] Suggestion/Help offer
> > > 
> > > I'm using the spambayes plugin for outlook, and while I find 
> > > it's a very
> > > good tool, it seems to lack the ability to "whitelist" & 
> > > "blacklist" certain
> > > addresses, in particular, I'd like to whitelist anything 
> that comes in
> > > through my corporate exchange email to remain in my inbox, 
> > > regardless of what it is.
> > 
> > First of all (and just for fun): If you corporate email 
> looks that much
> > like spam, you may have a look at the local help-wanted ads in
> > newspapers  ;-)
> 
> On a more serious note, I believe a whitelist function is definitely
> useful.  Some e-mail like Bruce Schneier's cryptogram almost 
> univerally
> gets classified as high spam probability probably because of 
> the topics 
> discussed.  I think I recall seeing some other examples of false 
> positives discussed that do have many spam-like characteristics.

Sorry, I didn't want to say it's useless. I had the same problem and
worked around with the outlook rules. I just wanted to say it may be
disadvantageous to incorporate this to Spambayes, although it's probably
the unique solution for these spambayes-flavours exterior to Outlook
like pop3proxy and so on.

I personally imagine a few awkward questions:
You'll have to discuss on things like if it's advantageous or not to
train on messages that have been classified by white-/blacklists.
You'll have to implement a nifty configuration for these whitelists:
"You recovered for the second time a mail coming from @microsoft.com. Do
you want to setup a whitelist-entry to prevent mails coming from
@microsoft.com to be classified as spam ?" Yeah ! That would certainly
be cool, but tricky ;-)

Furthermore, there are two huge advantages of rules set up by outlook:
1. It's already quite easy to set up these rules, including reading
addresses from the GlobalNamesAndAddr... ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
ActiveDirectory and a lot of other properties.
2. There are rules running on the Exchange-server. So they work even if
Outlook, Spambayes and the Client computer are switched off.