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May 07, 2004
Deleting Spam With My Eyes Wide Shut
I've been a long time user of SpamAssassin, but hadn't updated it for some time. About 6 weeks ago, I updated it to the latest version, which includes a Baysian filter. I spent some time making sure I correctly classified Junk and other mail and trained it regularly. For the last three weeks I've been checking my junk folder to ensure it didn't throw things away I wanted and I didn't find anything. Nothing. It lets a few things through, especially when its of a type it hasn't seen before, but after training again, that goes away. So today, I took the plunge and deleted over 1000 items in my Junk folder without even looking at them. Wow!
I read mail on my Ti-Book but filter on my mail server. So, I actually train on the Mac and then transfer the results to my server using this script:
#!/bin/sh SA_LEARN=$HOME/pkgs/Mail-SpamAssassin-2.63/sa-learn JUNK="$HOME/Library/Mail/POP-pj@pop.windley.org/Junk.mbox/mbox" DELETED="$HOME/Library/Mail/POP-pj@pop.windley.org/deleted.mbox/mbox" MAILBOXES=/Users/pjw/Library/Mail/Mailboxes BAYES_DIR="$HOME/.spamassassin" SEEN=$BAYES_DIR/bayes_seen TOKS=$BAYES_DIR/bayes_toks $SA_LEARN --spam --mbox $JUNK $SA_LEARN --ham --mbox $DELETED
After that I just scp the files up to my server and it works like a charm. It may seem odd that I only look at my Trash folder as ham. The Trash folder represents the largest collection of fresh email that isn't Spam. I When I first did this I did look at all my other folders with this line:
find $MAILBOXES -name mbox -exec $SA_LEARN --ham --mbox {} \;
But after running it once, my other folders don't change often enough to do this regularly, so I'll run that line occasionally. I don't want to waste time each day looking at all the other folders and not getting any information from them. There are, of course, a lot of other configurations you might use to get SpamAssassin in the loop, but this one's pretty slick. Between SpamAssassin and the built in features of Os X, I am virtually Spam free.
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Elegant Interface Designs in Open Source Software
Steven Garrity at Acts of Volition cites some examples of elegant interface design in open source software:
- Firefox
- Gnome and the Spatial Nautilus
- Hunting for Preferences in Gaim
He concludes with a paragraph or two discussing why the myth of the "power-user" and "average-user" is bad for interface design:
Rather than adding more and more features for the mythical ãpower userä, or swing to the other end of the spectrum and dumb-down the interface for the mythical ãaverage userä, smart developers are learning that good defaults and elegant interface design makes software better for everyone to use, regardless of their level of experience.From The Rise of Interface Elegance in Open Source Software | Acts of Volition
Referenced Fri May 07 2004 10:32:59 GMT-0600