|
|
By rkent, on February 12th, 2010 For anyone who gets lots of spam mail, I typically recommend that their anti-spam management plan must consist of a multi-stage process. A common open source solution to that (and the one that I use personally) is a server-based SpamAssassin (SA) front end, followed by a client-based bayes filter, in this case the Thunderbird (TB) default filter. Both filters are tuned to never give false positives, with Uncertain emails show in an Uncertain folder that I regularly watch.
In the Thunderbird 3.0 / SeaMonkey 2.0 series, I snuck in a little hidden preference to allow modifications to the way that [...]
By rkent, on February 10th, 2010 Since I see that checkin errors are fairly common, and a poorly controlled source of potential issues in Mozilla code, I developed my own written process that I follow whenever I do checkins. It’s probably over cautious, with a practice checkin locally before I do the real thing, but here it is in case anyone else is interested. This is my actual text, with little massaging for general audiences:
==== Check tinderbox for current checkin status and burns
(cd pristine/src) [This is a directory containing a clone of comm-central from mozilla] hg pull –u
(cd mozpush/src) [This is a directory [...]
By rkent, on February 1st, 2010 I’ve embarked on an effort to investigate adding support for Exchange server to the mailnews code. Although Exchange in Windows has traditionally used port 135-based protocols, my understanding is that the future for them is SOAP-based Exchange Web Services (EWS). As a first step, I wanted to get a basic SOAP library working in current mailnews code.
I considered a variety of approaches to this. One extension “Asertiva Thunderbird Extension for Sugar” uses the IBM/Prototype js library for SOAP access. Others recommended that I consider one of the open source SOAP libraries, such as a python-based library, or Apache’s AXIS2 [...]
By rkent, on January 22nd, 2010 A few weeks ago on IRC dmose and I discussed the general issue of how QA communicates priorities to developers. I’d like to hear some comments on that from others, and possibly participate in some sort of trial of improvements.
The issue here is that I see lots of good work going on by people who are mostly involved in QA, such as wsmwk, WADA, and Ludo, but I as a developer don’t really know how to make the best use of that work.
I assume there is supposed to be a waterfall here, from (bug reporter)->(QA)->(developer)->(code reviewer)->(bug landing). I [...]
By rkent, on December 2nd, 2009 I’ve been tracking some difficulties in my junk analysis recently, which was caused when I enabled some experimental changes to tokenization. (I added full tokenization of the Received: and x-spam-status: headers). At the same time, I started some experiments where I am automatically training certain incoming emails as good.
What I am seeing is that the common, unchanging words in the Received: header, like “received:from” and “received:(exim”, are persistently occurring with a moderate “good” score, such as 36, even after training junk messages with those headers. There are a lot of these little meaningless tokens per message though, and they [...]
By rkent, on November 28th, 2009 What then do I mean by “extension driven development”? It is the concept of changing the way that Thunderbird is developed and distributed, with a bare minimum set of core code, and the main features presented as a set of extensions, shipped with the product, that can be enabled or disabled by users.
I don’t have any illusions that this has a significant chance of being implemented, and I’m not even sure it’s a good idea myself. But I ask you to suspend disbelief for a minute, and imagine a change to the development culture and process.
An email client [...]
By rkent, on November 28th, 2009 Just for laughs, I looked at statistics for my spam yesterday. Here’s the results:
1) Spams caught by server-side SpamAssassin: 109
2) Spams caught by local bayes filter after passing SpamAssassin: 49
3) Spam marked by me that got through both filters: 2 (junkpercent scores were 63 and 66)
Total Spam: 160
For the server-side SpamAssassin filter, my spam detection limit is 5.0 This is the stock SpamAssassin filter supplied by default to all accounts by a large, inexpensive web hosting provider (hostmonster).
For my local bayes filter, my spam detection limit is set at 75.
I *never* have emails [...]
By rkent, on November 20th, 2009 The last few weeks I’ve been adding custom search terms to my FiltaQuilla extension using the new nsIMsgSearchCustomTerm interface, which can then be used in searches, virtual folders, or filters. But I keep coming up with new things that I want to do. That delays my packaging of FiltaQuilla 1.0.0 for non-experimental release. Maybe I should quit adding this stuff to FiltaQuilla (which is already pretty large with all of its filter actions) and define a new search-oriented extension, called probably SearchaQuilla?
So far, I have added the following new search terms:
BCC – locate items in the BCC field
[...]
By rkent, on November 6th, 2009 In a previous posting, I introduced the concept of inherited folder properties in the Mozilla mailnews products (Thunderbird and SeaMonkey). In the months since, I have incorporated these into my extensions quite significantly, so here I would like to show the UI I am currently using for this, and also discuss some of the issues that I face.
(All references to extensions in this posting refer to the 1.0.0 versions, which as of this writing have not been posted to AMO yet. But they should be available in a few weeks.)
Implemented UI
Briefly, inherited properties are a property that [...]
By rkent, on July 8th, 2009 It’s been a long time since I posted a blog, being busy with things I wanted to get into Thunderbird 3.0 beta 3 (and Seamonkey 2.0 beta 1). Now that we enter the dark days of the freeze prior to the release, I have some time to update extensions to use new features available in beta 3. But I’d like to give details first of changes in the backend areas where I am working, starting with email filtering in this post.
So here are things that are new in Thunderbird 3.0 beta 3 (Seamonkey 2.0 beta 1) that involve message [...]
|
|
Recent Comments