Re: w3 under development or not?

[Alan Mackenzie]

Peter Lee <pete_lee@swbell.net> wrote on Fri, 14 Nov 2003 22:39:24 GMT:
>>>>> Ted Zlatanov writes:

>     Ted> There are many, many such tools.  For Unix mail servers the
>     Ted> options are plentiful and a simple web search will turn them
>     Ted> up.  I don't use Windows mail servers but I'm sure similar
>     Ted> tools exist for them.

> After a brief look at Procmail and SpamAssassin, I don't see how they
> solve the problem.  Installing either locally still results in the mail
> being pulled down my small pipe from swbell.  The only benefit I see to
> them is if your mail client either: a) doesn't have spam support b)
> retrieves mail in a synchronous fashion

My ISP uses SpamAssassin.  I can rlogin to my ISP's mailserver and run a
mail client there (pine, as it happens).  I can use this to mark and
delete spam _before_ I download it through my modem.

[ .... ]

> I suppose I could lobby for swbell to install SpamAssassin.  But then
> I'm dependent on someone else setting up rules that could potentially
> cost me a valid email now and again.  They'd never do it anyway.

Why not ask them?  Are they happy having their modem lines needlessly
tied up whilst you download 20 or 80 "Microsoft last security patch"es?
Have you got a remote login facility at swbell?

> What would be cool is if (in Gnus) you could download mail headers
> only first... run through spam processor... then only download valid
> mail, and reprocess again including body.  The spam would still show
> up in spam group, possibly annotated to show that only the headers
> have been retrieved on some (hopefully most).  If you moved it to a
> ham group it would then fetch the mail, otherwise it would be expired
> and on expiry be deleted from the server the next time you asked for
> mail.

This is effectively what I do with an rlogin.

> It would be slower, but not as slow as downloading 20-80 of those
> patches.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Munich, Germany)
Email: aacm@muuc.dee; to decode, wherever there is a repeated letter
(like "aa"), remove half of them (leaving, say, "a").