Training on sent mail

[tony at svanstrom.org]

Malcolm Ryan writes: 

> Is there any way to train bogofilter on my _sent_ mail, so it gets to  
> know the people I usually correspond with? Sometimes I send mail to  
> someone, only to have their response labelled as spam or unsure. A  
> properly intelligent system shouldn't let this happen. Is there any  
> appropriate bogofilter/procmail magic I could weave to fix it?

Of course you can train on your sent mail if you want to, but that hasn't 
really got anything to do with what bogofilter does or doesn't do... It's up 
to you to set it up so that the e-mails you want to train on are sent to 
bogofilter.. 

Just use procmail on outgoing e-mails to store the message-ids, and then 
automatically have replies to all your outgoing e-mails trained on as ham 
when they arrive. That way all replies will get into your inbox without you 
having to train on outgoing e-mails. 

The lazy way of doing this is of course to make sure that the message-ids 
are unique enough that you can use procmail on only incoming e-mails to spot 
real replies from those using fake message-ids to trick such filters. 

I've been doing this for quite a number of years now, and it's still working 
great; spammers can't get by/use it without seriously increasing the 
costs/time involved; as they'd have to redo their whole harvesting-approach 
to not only get/store more information, but also to keep it updated (ie 
reharvest the same addresses again and again to get enough new message-ids). 


    /Tony