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[warning: 99% OT] does anything like this exist ?...

Fred Pacquier xnews2 at fredp.lautre.net
Tue Oct 26 09:40:05 EDT 2004 
First off, sorry for this message-in-a-bottle-like post... I haven't been 
able to phrase my questions well enough to get a meaningful answer from 
Google in my research. OTOH, it is standard flattery (but true) that this 
group has a bunch of the nicest and most knowledgeable Usenet people 
around, and I know for a fact that there are some pretty good spam-
related tools written in Python, so I thought I might get away with it 
:-)

Yes, it's about spam.

I have a (very old, POP3) email address that's flooded with spam (about 
500 msgs per 24 hrs, no thanks to the ISP...) but that I still need to 
use for various reasons. Of course it's unmanageable without some sort of 
bayesian spam filter.

When I work from home or office or my laptop, tools like Thunderbird or 
Pegasus+K9 do the job adequately. But I also frequently need to access it 
"on the road" with whatever comes in handy (Webmail etc.), and that 
becomes a problem if I've been away for even a short period.

One possible solution I've been mulling over, and looking for, would be 
some sort of selective, on-line filter/downloader. I have an always-on, 
Linux box at home on a decent DSL line ; on this I could have a daemon to 
frequently poll that POP3 address, pulling only the headers (or maybe the 
first body KB or so) and running those through a bayesian filter. If a 
message comes out "clean" it is left on the server (so I can access it 
from wherever I am), if it doesn't it is downloaded to a local mbox and 
removed from the server (like getmail.py does) so I can still dig out the 
occasional false positive when I'm home...

Is there a ready-made tool that fills this need ? If it's in Python so 
much the better, but actually I'll run anything else within my means 
(even perl :-) if it works without having to tinker the code... Also, 
it's possible that my single-minded approach is misled and there's a 
better way to achieve that goal, so I'm ready to change my mind too :)

TIA - again, sorry for the noise,
fp

-- 
YAFAP : http://www.multimania.com/fredp/
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