This is Not a Brain Surgery

06:54 pm - GMail as spam filter, using IMAP

One of non-obvious implications of Gmail offering IMAP interface, is that now you can easily access from outside your SPAM folder. It might sound like not such a big deal, but it opens access to Gmail spam filtering technology, which seems to be very good.

One obvious use is to use Gmail account as honey pot, and train your local spam filter using corpus of spam, caught by Gmail. I can see a cron task, fetching new spam from Gmail via IMAP and training spamassassin with it via 'sa-learn' command.

Another use would be to build a plugin for spamassassin, which sends a copy of each new message to gmail account with SMTP, when waits for it to appear either in INBOX or in SPAM folder. Thus, one could use Gmail as a spam filter.