IMAP made mail recovery pretty easy. I just had to recreate all my client filters and start rebuilding my spam corpus. My spam filtering was getting really, really good, averaging about 96% success and no false positives in over two months. I had about 2,000 spam messages in my "Junk" folder on IMAP so I retrained against that but so far it doesn't look good, and I suspect that I'm down to about ~90% success levels. It'll probably take a few months to get back to those >95% levels I've been enjoying.
I had a fairly recent browser profile backup so I was able to recover most of my bookmarks, my history through about two weeks ago and the bulk of my passwords. It took me about an hour to get things mostly into good shape for browsing but I did lose a big bookmarks cleanup that I did about a week ago.
Now my big hardship is moving between my work machines and my wife's machine at home. Maybe it's time for me to finally get off my butt and get all my stuff onto one of those USB keychain devices.
> my big hardship is moving between my work machines and my wife's machine at home
Maybe it's time to implement some good Roaming Profile fixing. ;-)
There should be a project which just houses massive amounts of verified spam. You download the mbox, mark it all as spam and voila, you're good to go!
Plairo, like I said above, IMAP makes moving between machines a breeze once I set up mail on both machines. Browser data would be nice but isn't nearly as important as having the rest of my computing data and applications all in the same place. Roaming profiles would, at best, save me a few minutes of mail filter setup and bookmark copying. It doesn't do jack for getting all my other data from home to work and back again.
--Asa
Kevin -
I believe that recent versions (since 1.4?) of Mozilla/Thunderbird do now include some training data based on a bunch of spam to give the spam filters a kick start.
However, it's never as good as doing your own training - you need to use spam mail and (more importantly) real mail of your own, so the spam filters can be accurate for your own mail. The content of spam for some people might be the same as someone else's legitimate email.
I've bought a LAKS USB watch a while ago. If it's your style of watch, it's maybe something to consider. Though opinions of its visual attractiveness seem to vary wildly. Anyway, I bought it because it requires less memory-attention to remember to wear your watch than to remember to carry along a keychain-anything, which helps if you're terminally forgetful, like me.
http://www.laks.com
Kevin: Don't know whether you asked for a spam archive, but ofcourse there are several.
One of the better known is www.spamarchive.org.
Asa:
Was this on a Windows box or a Linux box? There have been reports of trouble with JMC in TB on Windows boxen. Even I've seen it, yet the corresponding Linux builds are just fine.
95% is hardly worth writing home about. A decent target would be 99%; which users of POPFile, K9 and so on apparently achieve.