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Re: [Asrg] Summary of junk button discussion

2010-02-25 11:04:28
On 25/Feb/10 07:22, Chris Lewis wrote:
On 2/25/2010 12:45 AM, John Levine wrote:

The only think other than a junk button that appears useful is a
not-junk button to display when looking at stuff in a junk folder. I
suppose we could do that, but then we'd have to define what a junk
folder is.

I don't think John meant a "general" definition here... :-/

[...]
With more tweaking, such an implementation would be a bit more
user-friendly, and can stand as a guide as to how you might spec out
what the junk/unjunk button "means", and leave actions to the
implementation.

I cannot help distinguishing between IMAP and POP3 here. For IMAP, synchronization of Bayesian data among several servers and clients may be viewed as a generic distributed database problem, possibly complicated by an amount of fuzziness. It is possible to send an abuse report as a consequence of particular user's actions; it is just similar to "move marked junk to junk folder".

For POP3, there are no folders. That's what makes that definition difficult. Users can look for X-Spam-* headers only after they've already downloaded the message. In case servers maintain _per-user_ Bayesian data --as they should-- the whole idea of filtering on the servers seems rather pointless.

To recap, junk buttons can be embedded within a more sophisticated architecture (as for IMAP). But not the other way around: anti-spam filter training cannot (in general) be based upon junk buttons and abuse reporting.
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