[Spambayes] Spambayes for Web Access client

[Amedee Van Gasse]

On Mon, May 12, 2008 14:00, Jesse Pelton wrote:
> I don't think so. SpamBayes gets hooked into a e-mail client (or between
> the client and server), but when you use the Outlook web interface,
> there is no e-mail client, just a Web client. The server generates HTML
> sent to the browser and interprets the browser's requests, but that's
> HTTP traffic, not IMAP or POP3.

I can confirm this.
At work, I do second level office support, which includes email clients.
Outlook Web Access is a webmail client just like Squirrelmail or
Roundcube. It's neither a mailserver nor a mailclient, but it is just an
HTML rendering of your message store.
In the case of OWA, your mailserver is Exchange. In case of Squirrelmail
or Roundcube, your mailserver is usually something IMAP like Cyrus or
Dovecot.

Spam filters can work on servers or on clients. SpamBayes is a typical
client-side spamfilter, and when it is working as a proxy, it behaves like
a client to the original mailserver.
But in case of webmail, there is no mailserver to talk to. The mailserver
is not exposed, there is only a webserver.

The only places where you could fit on Spambayes in such a configuration,
are:
* leave an Outlook client open all the time, and install Spambayes as
Outlook plugin. Very inpractical.
* integrate SpamBayes in the mailserver. I don't know if this is possible
with Exchange, my first suggestion would be to put a Postfix or Exim
server in front of the Exchange server and run SpamBayes on that. The wiki
has instructions to do that.

But if you run Spambayes on a server, you loose much of its strength as an
individual spamfilter. At client-side, what is spam for me might not be
spam for you. At server-side, all spam filtering is equal.
Anyway if you are going to run a spamfilter at the mailserver, please
consider spamassassin on Postfix/Exim/Sendmail/Qmail/... or one of the
commercial thingies on Exchange.

There really is such a thing as the right tool for the right job.
Spambayes is not the right tool for server side filtering. But for client
side filtering, it's really wicked!

-- 
Amedee