On Wed December 1 2004 17:15, Laird Breyer wrote:
On Dec 01 2004, Bruce Lilly wrote:
On Tue November 30 2004 21:46, Laird Breyer wrote:
Unfortunately, retrieving/analysing full bodies are expensive
operations, for example think of an IMAP server where the MUA works
with headers only and downloads bodies only if absolutely necessary.
IMAP has a number of features that operate on the server's
message store as directed by the client, including searching
capability. There's also Sieve-based filtering.
IMAP is great for many things, but statistical filtering probably
isn't among them. A typical Bayesian filter [...]
It is certainly conceivable that an IMAP server would implement a
statistical component, but there are drawbacks,[...]
I don't think it's fair to single out IMAP; the issues that you mention
are far more germane to a protocol like POP3, where there are no
mechanisms for server-based searching/sorting/filtering or for
retrieval of message components. IMAP has mechanisms which
could be extended to handle statistical filtering etc., with the
same set of benefits that are characteristic of IMAP's other
features (e.g. access to the same message store -- and in the
case of Bayesian filtering, to the same set of data -- from any
client anywhere). POP3, on the other hand, doesn't have the
basic server-side processing as IMAP that would be a prerequisite
to implementation of specific server-side processing such as
statistical filtering.