[Pan-users] Re: Scoring, message-ID , pan development

[cav]

--- address@hidden wrote:

> At the risk of stating the obvious, the "references" header maps to the
> message-ids of posts to which the current posts is a followup, IOW, to
> upline posts.  While some spam follows up an initial post, and a score on
> references there should score all but the initial post, this likely won't
> be too successful in general because most spam either won't contain
> references, will be spam followups to legit posts (which would mean legit
> followups to the post would be scored as well), or would be just as fake
> as the subject and author headers you mention, and therefore probably
> rather useless in scoring.

Actually, I noticed that the references (or what pan is displaying as
references) seemed pretty consistant in the spam posts, which was why I was
interested in scoring against them.

It's possible that pan erronously sticks in the messageid into the references
field in the dialog, which would explain why that never worked... the actual
messages probably don't *have* a references field, despite what pan is showing
in the create-score dialog... that may be what through me off.  But it is
definately scoring when I change it to message-id in the score file.  So the
question is, exaclty what fields are actually availible to use in pan?  I guess
only a look at the code would tell us for sure...

> This is probably my biggest frustration with PAN.  Sometime back when PAN
> only had filters, not scoring, I asked about this, and Charles agreed that
> yes, this was worthwhile to implement, but that it wouldn't be coming any
> time "soon", as his only focus at that time was overview headers.  I read
> this as saying it was something to consider before PAN 1.0, but something
> that was, /like/ PAN 1.0, off somewhere in the fuzzy distant future.  Of
> course, that was while PAN development was pretty active, as well.  Now
> that the latest beta is getting close to a year old (well, January, so 9
> months, but it's looking to be a year...), and real active development 
> hasn't really occurred for another six months previous to that, PAN 1.0
> looks to be scheduled perhaps about the time Linux overtakes MSWormOS on
> the desktop, if even then.

I actually thought of digging into the code myself, however, one thing 
which has stopped me is pans attempt at being cross-platform. (and lack 
of time of course... I figured that by the time I got up-to-speed on the 
code suffiently to do anythign useful, pan development would have moved 
on, although that doesn't look like it is going to be the case right now) 
I'm not sure I'd care to go and fork the project however, and am not sure 
any fork of mine would be anything other than crappy in any case.  If the 
Ui is sufficiently isolated from the back-end it might be possible to go 
with a kde or gnome port, but I'm not familiar enough with the code to 
tell.

I like a lot of the features in pan, including the scoring and automatic 
multipart combining, but then by now other newsreaders may be just as good
in that regard (haven't bothered to check out any others recently)  And I'd
certainly give them all a whirl again before I tried anything major like
splitting my own fork off...  I'm just not sure I could give enough time to
something like that to make it worth the trouble.

cav

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