Idea for improving the learning stage

[David Relson]

On Fri, 7 Sep 2007 01:01:41 +0000 (UTC)
Andrew wrote:

> On Thu, 6 Sep 2007 19:11:21 -0400,
> David Relson <relson at osagesoftware.com> wrote:
> 
> > Since bogofilter normally classifies a message before the MUA is
> > used to view it, your message had me puzzled for a while.
> 
> 
> Hi David, surely bogofilter does its check before the user sees the 
> messages, but keep in mind that my idea only concerns the process of 
> manually flagging the individual emails, i.e. when we "teach"
> bogofilter by calling it with the -s or -n option.
> 
> 
> > After thinking a bit your idea seems more reasonable.  Assuming
> > your MUA can pass the read/unread state to a script, then the
> > script would be able to translate the MUA flag to a bogofilter
> > training flag.  This seems to be a technique that could be
> > implemented for a MUA, rather than a capability needing a change to
> > bogofilter.
> 
> 
> The client certainly needs the ability to pass message status, but 
> bogofilter should then use the status to decide whether to "learn" by 
> looking only at the subject line (unread message == the giveaway is
> in the subject) or by ignoring the subject and looking at the message
> body (if the user needed to open the message to understand it was
> spam).
> 
> Cheers,
> Andrew

The intelligence you suggest belongs in a script driving bogofilter.
With claws-mail I have two actions "classify as spam" and "classify as
ham".  These actions forward the messages to special addresses on my
mail server and procmail spots the messages and passes them to a
reclassify script.  The reclassify script looks at the forwarding
address and the message's X-Bogosity line then invokes bogofilter with
appropriate flags.  For example, since "X-Bogosity: Spam" and "forward
as ham" indicates a "False Positive" bogofilter gets run with "-S
-n".  Note that all the decision making is _outside_ of bogofilter.

HTH,

David