understanding bogofilter

[David Relson]

At 05:31 AM 5/6/03, Simon Huggins wrote:

>Salut Bogofilter!
>
>On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 08:52:22AM +0200, Boris 'pi' Piwinger wrote:
> > David Relson <relson at osagesoftware.com> wrote:
> > >>4. I want to setup an new mailbox called "spam" and have my users
> > >>forward their spam to that address. Is it ok to forward mail or does it
> > >>have to be bounced?
> > >It's O.K., though forwarding will change the headers some.
> > It would be crucial to have the headers forwarded. One idea
> > might be to forward the mails as attachments so that only
> > the attachment is given to bogofilter. The only question is
> > if users can be trained to do that correctly.
>
>Actually this is a very interesting point.  Perhaps there should a
>switch to discard either the message and only take the attachment or to
>discard attachments and only take the message when evaluating spam.
>
>For instance Dan's false positives mail got filtered out by my
>bogofilter because the attached mail looked like spam (it happened to
>score spamicity=0.499997)
>
>I believe (from reading this list) that bogofilter does MIME stuff.
>Maybe I'll have a look and see how easy it would be to patch this
>afternoon.

Simon,

Bogofilter understands MIME structure (boundaries, headers, bodies, etc), 
content-types (multipart/alternative, text/plain, text/html,..), encodings 
(base64, quoted-printable, uuencode), etc.  However it does not understand 
_all_ content-types.  In particular message/rfc822 isn't handled.  Using a 
perl script to extract the forwarded message would be a good solution.

David

P.S.  If anyone wants to write the perl script, there's room in the 
bogofilter/contrib directory.