On Mon, Feb 09, 2004 at 11:45:29PM -0500 or thereabouts, Tom Allison wrote:

I've got a question that isn't so SuSE-ish, but of interest just the same.

I'm starting to use the Courier-imap server rather than the uw-imap server and I have a question about batch processing of spam.

Typically what I do is sort email into folders to allow for corrections to the bayesian filters in case then got any of it backwards. I then run a crontab job to make all the corrections and then delete the old emails.

Under mbox format this was easy, I could just do something like: Under cyrus I tried something similar where I would read each file in seperately and then delete it. That fried my imap server for a few days.

So, I'm asking, how would you go about reading in lots of emails for processing (spamassassin, bogofilter, razor) and then deleting them?

Originally I thought I could take all the mail and store it into an mbox format, which would be very effective for batch processing, but courier-imap won't have any of that.

Courier only supports Maildir format, as you may have gathered... There is a way to do what you want by Spamassassin daemon (spamd), which is called from either maildrop or procmail using spamc in a recipe. This is done on the IMAP server side, and has the added benefit of sorting your email into its various folders. The spam can then be identified in the headers, and continued to be processed to your users, where they can filter it using their MUAs, or spam can be moved to its own folder for review, or just deleted.. -- Gary

Quoting Tom Allison :

I've got a question that isn't so SuSE-ish, but of interest just the same.

I'm starting to use the Courier-imap server rather than the uw-imap server and I have a question about batch processing of spam.

Typically what I do is sort email into folders to allow for corrections to the bayesian filters in case then got any of it backwards. I then run a crontab job to make all the corrections and then delete the old emails.

Under mbox format this was easy, I could just do something like: sa-learn --ham < mbox_file && > mbox_file Under cyrus I tried something similar where I would read each file in seperately and then delete it. That fried my imap server for a few days.

I'm more than a little reluctant to try it like that again.

So, I'm asking, how would you go about reading in lots of emails for processing (spamassassin, bogofilter, razor) and then deleting them?

Originally I thought I could take all the mail and store it into an mbox format, which would be very effective for batch processing, but courier-imap won't have any of that.

I am doing just what you describe under Courier-IMAP, putting false positives in IMAP folders and having a cron job process and delete them. Cyrus, IIRC, uses an index for faster lookup. It may not like it when a file is still in the index and has been deleted. This is just a guess, I have never used Cyrus. I have used Courier-IMAP for years and it has no lasting problem with other programs deleting messages in the Maildir. Note: if I pull up the message list in SquirrelMail that goes thru the IMAP, delete one of the messages with Mutt that reads the message files directly, and then try to read that message in SquirrelMail, it will produce some kind of error message, but it recovers fine. HTH, Jeffrey