Spam and mailing list filtering?

[James Vasile]

On Thu, 10 Feb 2011 12:20:55 +0000, Daniel Barlow <dan at telent.net> wrote:
> 1) (How) can I filter on the X-Spam-Bar header to chop out spam and
> suspected spam?

I just integrated Spambayes into my notmuch toolchain.

It's crude, but here's how it works:

My script does `find -mtime 0 | xargs grep -L
^X-Spambayes-Classification` to get all the recent files that aren't
already classified by spambayes.  It passes them to spambayes,
overwrites the mail file with the resulting mail (with spambayes header)
and then does `notmuch tag +spambayes id:$ID` for anythat come back
with "X-Spambayes-Classification: spam".

I suppose that in doing this I might leave myself open to spammers that
pre-seed emails with "X-Spambayes-Classification: ham" tags, but I
searched my mail archives and no messages came with those headers
already in place.

You could do something similar by searching for messages that aren't
tagged either spam or ham, looking in each for the header and adding the
appropriate tag.  It's clunky and maybe even brittle, but it works well
enough until notmuch gains the ability to search for arbitrary headers.

-James