bogofilter satisfaction report

[Peter]

On Tue, 26 Apr 2005, JoeHill wrote:

> Thanks. I looked over the manpage last night, and I'm running into 2 obstacles:
>
> 1. I use Sylpheed and incorporate my mail from /var/spool/mail/joehill, I don't
> keep my mail in ~/mail, which leads to

The bogofilter runs from procmailrc. If you use procmailrc insert the 
necessary bogofilter rules from the bogofilter manpage into your 
procmailrc. If you do not use procmail the you should be using it imho. 
I do not know Sylpheed. If it's a MUA it is not relevant in this 
context. Spam filtering with bogofilter is done in the mail transport, 
not in the MUA. Basically procmailrc runs *before* mail is stored in 
/var/spool/mail/joehill (it is run by the MTA via ~/.forward which calls 
procmail which uses ~/.procmailrc). It (procmail) decides whether to 
drop messages, store spam in ~/mail/spam and forward messages to the 
mailbox or whatever you need.

> 2. The messages in my ~/Sylpheed folder, IIANM, are not in mbox format, each
> mail is a seperate file.

You can reinject them as is if they have the mbox format. Also look at 
the formail command from the procmail package. It can be used to 
re-inject mail into the system or resort it into mailboxes.

> I'll check Google for converting from the Sylpheed file type, but will
> Bogofilter work with the way I have things set up currently? ie. all my mail
> comes from /var/spool/mail, not ~/mail.

Your mail goes to /var/spool/mail by following the path:

message -> MTA -> ~/.forward -> /usr/bin/procmail ... \
 	... -> ~/.procmailrc -> /var/spool/mail/joehill

by adding bogofilter to your ~/.procmailrc you will filter the mail 
*before* it reaches /var/spool/mail/joehill. You can also add it as a 
filter to the MTA. Remember that bogofilter does not delete anything. It 
marks messages with a spam score. Something else then reacts on that 
mark. It can be you or it can be a program (like the MTA or procmail).

You can have as many folders as you like in ~/mail ~/lists ~/backups or 
wherever you like as long as it's a writable directory as user joehill.

The procmailrc rules can be set up to deliver anywhere, including remail 
certain messages to somewhere else.

Peter
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