[wplug] Is Spamassassin good?

[Eric Cooper]

On Sun, Aug 19, 2007 at 02:23:26PM -0400, Mike Sussman wrote:
> I was using it with Kmail, and I have an imap account that is my main mail 
> account.  The way it is configured, each email needed to be downloaded, run 
> through Spamassassin, and then uploaded back to the imap account.  The 
> problem is that, on two occasions the upload failed, sending all my new 
> messages to the great bitbucket in the sky!  This is not Spamassassin's 
> fault, I know, but it seems to be the only way for me to use it, and it is 
> unacceptable.

I use spamassassin in a similar way, but with one crucial difference.
I fetch each email from the IMAP server without deleting it and run
it through spamassassin.  If it's spam, I simply *move* the email on
the server into a spam folder, rather than uploading it again.

The only drawback is that you don't see the markup that spamassassin
can optionally add, describing the spam score and checks run, etc.  But
since this is much faster and more reliable, I don't mind (and I can
run spamassassin manually on a given message when I'm curious).

I do this in a simple Perl script run as a cron job on my
workstation @ CMU.  I'm happy to share it if anyone wants.

-- 
Eric Cooper             e c c @ c m u . e d u