Re: IMAP extensions needed for SPAM/HAM and WHITE/BLACK listing

[Ned Freed <ned.freed@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> On 3 jul 2009, at 1:05, George Michaelson wrote:

> > As an example, at the moment if I wish to inform google that I have
> > known spam in local folders, I have to go to the web interface and
> > manually tag. If there was an IMAP extension, I could review my
> > local baysian junk folder, remove all non-spam (and flag the senders
> > as white-listed if need be), and request the rest to be flagged as
> > spam back on the IMAP backed MS.

> Doesn't moving the spam messages to the spam folder accomplish this
> already? That's what my client does.

Please explain how moving a message to a random, arbtirarily named folder tells
the server anything useful. People use all sorts of different naming schemes
for folders, and it's common for clients to provide lots of flexibility in this
area.

The obvious way to make this work in IMAP is with a standardized folder
annotation saying "messages put in this folder were flagged as spam". Then
moves of messages to the folder with this annotation provide the server with
the necessary information that this message is considered to be spam by the
user. And by the same token, moving a message from this folder can be construed
as the message not being considered spam after all.

It isn't perfect, but as long as this is taken as an indicator, not as an
absolute statement, it should get the job done.

> But if you want this, I'd say that it needs to be a fractional thing,
> not a binary spam/no spam indication. For instance, the server could
> give something a spam score of 2 and the client also 2 and together
> that would be 4 so the message is presumed to be spam (assuming the
> spam threshold is 3), but in a binary system no spam OR no spam = no
> spam.

There's a place for fractional scoring in spam filtering, but this isn't
it. A user doesn't think "this message is 90% likely to be spam", they
either think it's spam or it isn't.

				Ned