> > What's an auto-ham?
>
> Automatically marking something as ham after a given
> timeout.. regardless of how long that timeout is, someone is going
> to forget to submit the message back as spam.
OK, here's a refinement.  Assuming very little spam comes through, we
only need to pick a small percentage of ham received as new training
ham to match the new training spam.  The program could randomly select
a sufficient number of saved non-spam msgs and ask the user to
validate this selection.  You could do this once a day or week (config
parameter).
> How many spams-as-hams can be accepted before the f-n rate gets
> unacceptable?
Config parameter.
> I view IMAP as a stop-gap measure until tighter integration with
> various email clients can be achieved.
>
> I still feel it's better to require classification feedback from the
> recipient, rather than make any assumptions after some period of
> time passes. But this is an end-user issue and we're still at the
> algorithm stage.. ;-)
I'm trying to think about the end-user issues because I have nothing
to contribute to the algorithm at this point.  For deployment we need
both!
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

> Dunno about the other tools, but SpamAssassin is a breeze to incorporate
> into a procmail environment.  Lots of people use it in many other ways.  For
> performance reasons, many people run a spamd process and then invoke a small
> C program called spamc which shoots the message over to spamd and passes the
> result back out.  I think spambayes in incremental mode is probably fast
> enough to not require such tricks (though I would consider changing the
> pickle to an anydbm file).
>
> Basic procmail usage goes something like this:
>
>     :0fw
>     | spamassassin -P
>
>     :0
>     * ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
>     $SPAM
>
> Which just says, "Run spamassassin -P reinjecting its output into the
> processing stream.  If the resulting mail has a header which begins
> "X-Spam-Status: Yes", toss it into the folder indicated by the variable
> $SPAM.
>
> SpamAssassin also adds other headers as well, which give you more detail
> about how its tests fared.  I'd like to see spambayes operate in at least
> this way: do its thing then return a message to stdout with a modified set
> of headers which further processing downstream can key on.
Do you feel capable of writing such a tool?  It doesn't look too hard.
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)