Cliff, et al -- ...and then Cliff Sarginson said... % % On Tue, Dec 11, 2001 at 08:22:04PM -0700, Rob 'Feztaa' Park wrote: % > On Wed, Dec 12, 2001 at 03:07:59AM +0100, Cliff Sarginson (dis)graced my inbox with: % > > I still feel very dumb on this. % > > Can someone explain to an idiot what the scoring is for % > > and how you use it. % > > The manual assumes you know. % > > I assume it is some kind of super-filtering technique. % > % > I don't actually use scoring myself, but it is a neat idea.
I'm in the same boat, in fact :-) What we really need is for active scorers to reply! % > ... % > After a message gets it's score, you can take action based on the score. % > for instance, you might want to put messages with a high score into a % > special folder like ~/mail/important or something, and messages with a % > low score into the garbage. % > % Mmm. % How is that better than other filtering techniques? % What you say sounds plausible, but is it the whole story ? AIUI scoring can be applied at many levels and then acted upon, while filtering would have to be applied in one shot and then acted upon. Suppose you've noticed that mail from @spammer.com is usually spam, but not always; you could give that mail a -10 score. Then suppose you have a few key phrases (MAKE MONEY FAST, !!!!!!!!, and so on) that are usually spam; you could give those emails a -10 score, too. You might have a really excited friend, though, who always uses bangs, so you could give her back a +10. Throw in some other characteristics here and there, by no means all related to spam (perhaps system-generated mail gets a low score unless you see your handy error flag in the body). Finally, at read time, you see how low the score is (maybe you had an MMF !!! email from @spammer.com; that oen is pretty sure, right?) and act upon it. If you tried to implement all of that, with those incremental tests, in procmail your rules would be ugly *and* you'd have a lot of duplication (I imagine the same sorts of problems would apply to any filter, but I dunno from maildrop or the others recently mentioned -- yet). Of course, back to the original bit of this thread, you'd have had to start off with a default positive score so that you'd have had something from which to subtract... Negative scores seem simpler because you can avoid that initial setting, but it really works out the same way (score up and then take that as your baseline)... % % -- % Regards % Cliff % :-D -- David T-G * It's easier to fight for one's principles (play) [EMAIL PROTECTED] * than to live up to them. -- fortune cookie (work) [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.justpickone.org/davidtg/ Shpx gur Pbzzhavpngvbaf Qrprapl Npg!
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