[Alpine-info] Trivia trick on big folders

[Lucio Chiappetti via Alpine-info]

On Wed, 3 Sep 2025, D. Hugh Redelmeier via Alpine-info wrote:


> I don't seem to have this problem.  My Alpine is using /var/spool/mail 

> and ~/mail/... on Linux.


You are lucky to still have it, I made a successful attempt to emulate it, 
but requires some tricks (fetchmail).


> This may be a rare configuration: I'm running a mail server on the same 

> machine.  It's the way I've used MUAs for 50 years


Well ... 50 maybe is a lot. We started having e-mail in the late '80s. 
There should be e-mail from me (on BITNET) archived somewhere dating 1990 
or just before.

And yes, that's the way I like to use MUAs, amd the way my workplace used 
to work (local spamassassin filtering, very effective, no false positives 
and very few false negatives) until the whole national institution decide 
to move to Gsuite because of decaying know-how on how to run a mail server 

:-(



> One could do this with fetchmail (or getmail?) to copy messages from 

> IMAP to the local machine.


Yes, currently I use fetchmail to get my mail and work (almost) in the 
good old way.

On Wed, 3 Sep 2025, Andrew C Aitchison via Alpine-info wrote:


> I was under the impression that if you moved a message from

> spam to not spam, Gmail automatically fed that into the algorithm.


Sorry to contradict you, but my impression was the opposite. I tried 
systematically in the first months of Gsuite to mark false positives as 
not spam, but IT DID NOT LEARN. Also it required to log in gmail using 
their client (which is something I'd like to avoid) to use the no-spam 
button.


> There may (or may not) be a hook in Alpine where you could add

> something which reads the spam folder by imap and moves selected

> messages out to some other folder.

> Can anyone say whether there is such a hook - Eduardo ?


Do not know about doing that all in Alpine, possibly a rule, if you can 
master the odd fodler naming of gmail.

Thr way to do that in Alpine MANUALLY is to access gmail spam folder via 
imap in Alpine and move false positives. This is what I do routinely once 
per day.

Actually I've configured gmail to forward all NON-SPAM (as they classify 
it, for spam-marked is too late) to a third provider. From there I use 
fetchmail. This other provider can have a few false positives of its own, 
but in this case I felt simpler to use fetchmail from its spam folder 
automatically.

See my message of Aug 17 for some Alpine syntax I use.