On Sunday 26/12/2010 at 7:45 pm, "Abello, Vinny" wrote:
Hi all, and happy holidays!
Understanding that enabling g_spam_nobounce is a recommended setting and also understanding the positive effects of using Friends for holding spam messages (ie. the spam folder in Surgeweb/IMAP), what happens to a user who is using existing hold/bounce/vanish settings today if g_spam_nobounce were to be enabled? Are all of those settings effectively turned off or ignored, or do they continue to work but the user is then unable to access or change them? If they are turned off automatically, is there a way to translate an old hold setting to a new one in friends automatically, or is the only mechanism using domain or global defaults?
The setting g_spam_nobounce disables the users 'bounce/vanish' settings from working, it doesn't disable the 'hold' setting.
This is recommended for two reasons, the range of spam scores produced by the new filters was slightly larger (and to be blunt, a bit more random in some cases particularly initially as we worked through some glitches :-)) so without that setting there was a high risk of a user who had used the 'reject/vanish' settings would loose some real email. In some respects this g_spam_nobounce setting was a stop gap measure to prevent 'email loss' while we sorted things out.
Generally the vanish option should never be used and we think should be very strongly discouraged :-)
The reject option is valid but only if carefully set and understood. And it's only safe if the spam filtering is tuned to give a safe level of filtering, this is something
we realized after the version in question. So What we've been working on now is to tune the filters with 'two' scores.
6+ might be spam
10+ definitely spam.
(this is in 5.1g-1 and later - still in beta)
As we now now tune the filters for these two values (6,10) the filter ranges won't tend to drift in future the way they have in the past, which will mean future upgrades won't tend to annoy users by apparently filtering more or less.
These two 'reliable' spam scores means a user with a large spam problem can usefully set their options to use 'friends/pending' at level 6 and 'reject' at level 10 without much fear of loosing real emails. But most users would just use friends/pending at a value between 6 and 10 depending on their needs and wouldn't reject at all.
So in 5.1g-1 and later the user 'reject' settings work again, even with g_spam_nobounce turned on, which is counter intuitive, but basically with that version it is again safe to use those settings and they can help to reduce the volume of spam a user has to look through.
Clear as mud...
So, upgrade to the latest beta if this is likely to be an issue, and then g_spam_nobounce is not so important either way.
ChrisP.
Thanks!
-Vinny
