no filtering without ham

[Sven Burmeister]

Hello everybody!

I use bogofilter with kmail and it works very well. However there is an issue 
that comes up quite frequently with people who start using kmail+bogofilter 
for the first time.

The issue is that bogofilter seems to only start marking as spam after the 
user has marked some emails as ham.

From the questions I answered for new users, their workflow is something like 
this:

- Use kmail's anti-spam wizard to set-up filters. This means that spam will be 
moved into some other folder than the inbox.
- Wait for spam and mark it as such to train bogofilter.

They do not mark emails as ham, because there is no need to, since they were 
not moved into the spam folder, i.e. for them, as long as it is not falsely 
marked as spam, there is no need to tell bogofilter that it did something 
wrong.

As a result, bogofilter never starts to sort out spam emails, no matter how 
long they train it by marking spam emails. Hence for them bogofilter+kmail do 
not work.

There are several ways to work around this issue.

- Kmail could pipe some bogus mails through bogofilter as ham, to feed the 
wordlist.
- Kmail could mark all incoming mails as ham
- Kmail could display a message when setting up filters that tell the user to 
mark emails as spam and ham, since otherwise bogofilter will not work.
- bogofilter could start working after it was trained with spam emails only 
and get the ham stats after that, when users mark false positives.

Before I talk to the kmail devs, are you aware of this issue and what 
"solution" would you prefer? Maybe you have an even better approach, so feel 
free to comment and add.

Sven