Its would be easier to scan held mail for possible valid mail if it was presented according to some held criteria, instead of by time received. A high spamassassin rating, for example, is unlikely to be a valid email that got past a low filter setting. If it were at the top of the list it would be less likely to be missed among a hundred spam.

Perhaps I can already do that, in which case I apologize in advance.

If so, better chance of picking up a response here, if not this will be moved to "New Feature Request". I do seem to recall discussions on other sorting options. Using the search function on any page with the words sort heldmail produces many hits (OK, some are just LoFi-HiFi duplications). Nothing in those? Perhaps a mail user can weigh in?

[edit - moved from the lounge, PM sent, redirector left for the moment]

Is SpamCop detaining a lot of your non-spam mail? It is difficult for me to remember the last time that SpamCop made a false positive on my mail, but of course everyone's situation is different.

I know we discussed SpamAssassin threshold scores in another topic, and I understood that you were going to lower yours. Did you do this? Did you notice a lot of false positives after that point? If so, then one obvious fix would be to raise it back up again (mine is at 5, the default value).

-- rick

No. I haven't got a problem. I did lower my threshold and that eliminated all of the spamcop addressed email that prompted some of my earlier posts here (and the fun I had in repeatedly sourcing their varying host URLs). The only ones I now get are a very few of the more sophisticatedly disguised "ads" for legitimate products to one of my other emails addresses.

It is simply that I think it would be a lot easier to scan the list if it was presorted as I suggested, as I doubt I would ever get a legitimate email with a spamassassin rating above 4 or 5 or even 3. I do still get a hundred or more (other than the occasional f*ups with thousands) to my spamcop email address every day. I think I'm at about 130k now.

I could of course just change my email address and have them go to a black hole somewhere, but I feel I'm doing some kind of service to society, if only adding to the statistics of the assholes who don't.

I get one or two a week and yesterday I got five... Three came from a contact who is travelling on business and found himself in Turkey on a public wireless IP which was listed. The others were trapped because of the insistence of some to use various HTML tricks in their Email. There were sufficient to start the spamassassin score at 3.8 before any of the other checks got added in and took it over 5.0 (my trigger).

But using grey-listing, I never have more than 20 spam messages held - and 20 would be a large number for me. So it is easy enough to scan for good mail.

Andrew

One workaround is the use of the Search command as I think someone suggested.

If you search the Held folder for whole of message contains "hits=5. OR hits=4. OR hits=3. OR hits=2."
and save the search as virtual folder box then you would see just the likely items that should not be in Held. with very little trouble.

(This is the header line X-spam-Status: hits= but Search doesn't seem to work to find a target with embedded spaces so I just used the hits= segment)

Same idea could work if you have a mail client that can use IMAP and do filtering on the contents of the header.

Yes, but not practical if one submits multiple times daily with just a few mouse clicks. Presumably a scri_pt could be written by the user to do this automatically, but I don't know how. The easiest would be if spamcop would do it as a user service.

Indeed the easiest, but I think my suggestion is practical.

By "a few mouse clicks" I assume you mean, in SC Webmail

Click and view the "Held mail" folder
click "select all" box
click "report as spam" then reply "yes"

If you define from Search of the Held folder and save permanently a virtual folder calling it say SAless5
whole of message NOT match hits=0. AND NOT match hits=1. AND NOT match hits=2. AND NOT match hits=3. AND NOT match hits=4.

Then (multiple times daily) click and view SAless5
click "select all" box
click "report as spam" then reply "yes"

Now click and view the "Held mail" folder
anything left is worth a double check
click "select all" box
click "report as spam" then reply "yes"