-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Wed, Apr 27, 2016 at 09:53:31AM +0100, Brian wrote: > On Wed 27 Apr 2016 at 20:31:17 +1200, cbannis...@slingshot.co.nz wrote: > > > On Sat, Apr 23, 2016 at 12:57:08PM -0500, John Hasler wrote: > > > > Thanks for making me think of that and the fact that over the last 10 > > > > years, the only ham its seen are its mistakes. So this question might > > > > have had the seeds of something to help. :) > > > > > > My scripts copy all new non-spam to a ham directory which is fed to > > > sa-learn every night and then the contents of both the ham and the > > > spam directories are deleted. > > > > IIRC, it seems pointless feeding your mail through a spam filter > > if you're downloading it from your ISP/email provider. > > I think you are assuming the ISP provides a spam filtering service and > you are happy to entrust the deletion of your mail to it.
There is still some truth to the above: The most effective measure against spam these days is rejecting the mail up front (i.e. while the SMTP session is active). This way a (hopefully rare!) false positive is rejected in a way the sender can act on it. Once you got the mail it's too late. Either you have to generate a bounce (not a good idea these days, because real spam will have bogus headers and the bounce will hit a poor unsuspecting victim), or you have to look into the spam anyway, or the spam disappears in a black hole (again not a good idea, since in the false positive case the sender will newer know). Therefore once your ISP has accepted the mail for you it's kinda "too late" -- they better have a good spam filtering setup in which you have some influence (the spam filter will only work if it has a notion of what *you* consider to be spam/ham). regards - -- t -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAlcggucACgkQBcgs9XrR2kZ1ogCfeTi3TQaPGTu14RAC2ShE8A7u WuIAmwQ39ELaXqqqfMxlov5kIa4uMW0y =t67R -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----