Hi everyone

Just wondering if anyone had any suggestions for an IMAP client or similar which could apply rules to my held mail folder to automatically transfer any good messages found into my inbox? Basically, I am now getting too much spam every day to manually sift through it looking for the occasional false positive. I have therefore set up a saved search in Thunderbird, and have been able to fine tune this to quite successfully identify the few good messages which have been caught in error. However, I would now like to automate this process, and was wondering if anyone had got any suggestions of an IMAP client which could run rules like this on the held mail folder and then transfer any messages identified as "non-spam" into the inbox. Unfortunately Thunderbird won't do this as by default its rules check the inbox first (unless someone knows a workaround for this?).

Fairly flexible as to platform for this, as I have either an SBS 2003 server or an "always-on" Win2K machine which it could run on.

Many thanks in advance.

I suspect that this is going to be the case for amny mail clients. What about approaching the problem from the other direction.

You could relax your current spam filtering to allow more spam into your inbox together with the 'few good messages' and then run whatever rules are necessary to move the spam that gets through into the held folder.

Andrew

Many thanks for the suggestion. I had thought about that, but I am actually very happy with the way Spamcop is working at present; I don't really want to reinvent the wheel by trying to write my own version of SpamAssassin. I have already built up fairly extensive whitelisting on my mailbox, so what I am talking about is perhaps three or four messages caught in error every day, out of perhaps 1,000+ pieces of spam. I have also analysed the messages that get caught, and it doesn't seem to be any particular blocklist that catches them, so relaxing the filtering to ensure no false positives in the heldmail would have to be across the board and cause a lot of spam to get released into my inbox; it wouldn't just be a case of turning SpamAssassin down a notch.

As I said earlier, I have managed to fine-tune the saved search in Thunderbird quite well so it finds the caught genuine messages fairly well (I have also incorporated, for instance, a "password" into everyone's email signatures, which is one of the strings Thunderbird searches for so it always identifies replies to messages we have sent), and so it is that process I would really like to automate. However, whether there is actually anything out there which will do that is another matter ....

Thanks again for the suggestion.

You're welcome. But like you, I'm not sure if there are any mail clients around that would do what you want.

I use Pegasus Mail and I can configure a search which I then save and can run again later. But I can't see anyway to automate that process.

What would be the trigger to initiate the process? Presumably it would run when you first open the mail program. But what about sometime later when you haven't closed the program but more mail has been delivered. How would the program know to initiate the action?

I fear that you'll be resigned to manually running the search/move process. But keep us all in touch with your progress if you find something that will do what you want.

Andrew