Re: Puzzled by webmail filters

"Peter Pearson" <ppearson@nowhere.invalid> wrote in message 
news:frjpkv$3t1$1@news.spamcop.net...
>I can't understand the behavior of custom filters in my
> webmail account.  Here's this morning's example:
Does anything in this topic give you a hint on how to discover what is going 
on?
http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=2321

I don't do much filtering of email so I don't know what to look for.

Miss Betsy 

I can't understand the behavior of custom filters in my
webmail account.  Here's this morning's example:

  1. I log in at webmail.spamcop.net.  My account is set up
     so that I start out in the Held Mail folder.
     There are 20 messages.

  2. I click on the filter icon.  Four messages are moved to
     "INBOX.Spam for sure". Of the remaining 16 messages,
     four appear to be in Japanese, even though I have a
     filter (Content-Type contains ISO-2022-JP) that is
     supposed to move Japanese messages to "INBOX.Spam for
     sure".

  3. I click on the filter icon again.  No messages are moved.

  4. I go to "Filters / Edit your filter rules" and edit my
     Japanese filter.  I make a does-nothing change, then
     click "save rule", "save settings", and
"Mail", which
     gets me back to Held Mail with 16 messages.

  5. I click the filter icon. Seven messages are moved to
     "INBOX.Spam for sure" -- but none of the four Japanese
     messages.  Nine messages remain, including the four
     Japanese messages.

  6. I repeat step 4 exactly.

  7. Now when I click the filter icon, the four apparently
     Japanese messages get moved to "INBOX.Spam for sure".

So I clicked on the filter icon four times, and got four
different responses, two of which seem quite unreasonable.
(During this sequence, no new messages arrived.)  The
first time, four messages got moved; that's good.  The
second time, nothing got moved; that's good, because I'd
expect the filter to be idempotent.  The third time, seven
messages got moved, but I have no idea why they weren't moved
the first or second time, nor why the Japanese messages didn't
get moved.  The fourth time, four messages got move, but why
didn't they get moved the third time?

Am I doing something wrong with this filter?  It appears that
the filter doesn't get applied unless I go and poke it, and
even then it only gets applied if some coin-toss comes up
Heads.

I have a foreboding that this is an FAQ, but hunting
through the official FAQ
(http://www.spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/336.html) didn't
come close.  If the real documentation is someplace else,
I'd love to learn about that, too.

-- 

On Sun, 16 Mar 2008 15:47:57 -0400, Miss Betsy <devnull@spamcop.net>
wrote:
>
> "Peter Pearson" <ppearson@nowhere.invalid> wrote in message

> news:frjpkv$3t1$1@news.spamcop.net...
>>I can't understand the behavior of custom filters in my
>> webmail account.  Here's this morning's example:
> Does anything in this topic give you a hint on how to
> discover what is going on?
> http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=2321

Yes, somewhat, thanks.  I learned that Spamcop uses IMP to
provide webmail service, and that people get baffled by
filtering for many reasons, but none of those reasons seem
to explain a message's passing the filter now but failing
the filter one minute from now.  And I learned that persistent
pursuers of filtering anomalies ultimately get sent to
http://www.horde.org/imp/.  Implementing a webmail system
in PHP (e.g., IMP) doesn't seem like a brilliant idea, so
I doubt I want to get involved in a debugging project there.

Maybe I'll dust off that Python program I used back in 2006:
it runs on my desktop, reaches out to Spamcop using IMAP,
and sorts messages into the appropriate folders.  I quit
using it when my daily spam volume got so low that it was
more trouble than it was worth.

-- 

Peter Pearson wrote:
> I can't understand the behavior of custom filters in my
> webmail account.

> I have a foreboding that this is an FAQ, but hunting
> through the official FAQ
> (http://www.spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/336.html) didn't
> come close.  If the real documentation is someplace else,
> I'd love to learn about that, too.

I don't have a spamcop mail account, but I'll add some orientation.

There is a stealthed spamcop newsgroup which is a secondary support area
for mail, spamcop.mail, whereas the primary support area would be
considered the webforum at http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/

The webforum has a lot of forum/faq information at
http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?showforum=4   SpamCop Email
System & Accounts

There is a 'big ol' faq-ish forum thing at
http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=2238  Original
SpamCop FAQ & Added Forum Items, Never up to date, changes often

... which has a section - SpamCop Email System & Accounts - and a
section called - FAQ about the personal webmail filters, Client filters
within webmail -
http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=2321

-- 
Mike Easter
kibitzer, not SC admin

Peter Pearson wrote:
> On Sun, 16 Mar 2008 15:47:57 -0400, Miss Betsy <devnull@spamcop.net>
wrote:
>> "Peter Pearson" <ppearson@nowhere.invalid> wrote in
message 
>> news:frjpkv$3t1$1@news.spamcop.net...
>>> I can't understand the behavior of custom filters in my
>>> webmail account.  Here's this morning's example:
>> Does anything in this topic give you a hint on how to
>> discover what is going on?
>> http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=2321
> 
> Yes, somewhat, thanks.  I learned that Spamcop uses IMP to
> provide webmail service, and that people get baffled by
> filtering for many reasons, but none of those reasons seem
> to explain a message's passing the filter now but failing
> the filter one minute from now.  

So, I guess you verified that 'the "Stop checking if this rule
matches?" 
checkbox is unchecked in all rules (except maybe the last one in the 
chain).'

That would explain, quite logically, how filtering could be different