[sylpheed:30334] Re: junk filtering not automatic

[Stefaan A Eeckels]

On Tue, 31 Oct 2006 17:19:23 +0100
Levente Kovacs <lkovacs at xperts.hu> wrote:

> On Tue, 31 Oct 2006 16:50:38 +0100
> Stefaan A Eeckels <Stefaan.Eeckels at ecc.lu> wrote:
> 
> > IMAP servers are designed to hold mail, and to allow it to be
> > managed
> 
> IMAP implements full "personal mobility". That is a feature, and it
> takes bandwidth to do it.

Full personal mobility as far as email is concerned, I suppose (or have
you solved the problem of squirting people through their mailboxes? :)

Yes - that's what one would use an IMAP server for. Hold mail, make
it available, and manage it on a device of one's choice. 

The fact remains that in order to apply a SPAM filter to email messages
they need to be downloaded to the machine doing the filtering. As a
result, if you want to filer on the current email client, _all_ the
messages need to be downloaded, not just those that the user wants to
read. To all intents and purposes, it amounts to the same as
downloading all the mail using POP3.

Hence my comment that this "personal email mobility" (which can also be
implemented through e.g. Webmail) needs to be really important, and why
it would be far, far better to implement filtering on the server. 

This leads me to conclude that if I need both "personal mobility" of
the IMAP kind, and SPAM filtering I would chose a provider that offers
SPAM filtering on the IMAP server. Local SPAM filtering would then
complement the central filtering, and the way it currently works in
Sylpheed seems more than appropriate.

I just thought of this - there is another good argument against
filtering on the client. If you move from system to system, how are you
going to carry the SPAM database with you? You will have incomplete
databases on all the systems on which you filter, and merging those
database will be a nightmare.

The more I look at it, the less attractive the idea becomes.

Take care,

-- 
Stefaan
-- 
As complexity rises, precise statements lose meaning,
and meaningful statements lose precision. -- Lotfi Zadeh