Files
Maven/internal/email/junk.go
T
kami b4646155b4 Read a mailbox read-only, in a client small enough to audit (#246)
internal/email is the reading half of the email reader: a ~200-line IMAP
client (LOGIN, EXAMINE, UID SEARCH SINCE, UID FETCH BODY.PEEK, LOGOUT), a
MIME-to-plaintext converter, and a header-only junk filter.

Two protocol choices are the design, not shortcuts. EXAMINE instead of
SELECT means the session is read-only at the protocol level, so no command
in it can flip a flag or expunge anything by mistake. BODY.PEEK instead of
BODY means reading a message does not mark it \Seen — Maven reads his mail
and leaves no trace of having done so, and the unread state in his own
client stays his.

Hand-rolled rather than go-imap because this is the one path that holds his
mailbox credential and reads his private mail: five commands with no
dependencies is auditable in a sitting. No IDLE and no cleartext/STARTTLS
either — an option to send his password over a plain socket is an option to
get it wrong once.

Junk is decided by headers alone, before any model is involved:
List-Unsubscribe/List-Id, Precedence: bulk, Auto-Submitted, the spam
headers, and Gmail's own category labels. Sender lists and subject keywords
are deliberately absent — they age badly and they would put his contacts in
a config file. A junk verdict only means "do not spend the model on this";
nothing is deleted and no server flag is touched.

Nothing here logs a body, a subject or an address, the junk reason names a
header rather than content, and an undecodable charset degrades to
headers-only instead of feeding the model mojibake. Verified against
recorded .eml fixtures and an in-process fake IMAP server.
2026-08-01 02:59:24 +04:00

81 lines
3.3 KiB
Go

package email
import (
"net/mail"
"strings"
)
// The junk filter — the cheapest and most important half of reading mail.
//
// A mailbox is mostly machine-generated: newsletters, receipts nobody acts on,
// social notifications, marketing. Sending all of it to a 1.7B and asking "is
// there a task here" produces confident nonsense at a rate proportional to the
// volume, so junk is decided by HEADERS, before any model sees the message.
//
// The rules are all bulk-mail markers that senders set on themselves, never
// guesses about content:
//
// - List-Unsubscribe / List-Id — by definition a mailing list. If he can
// unsubscribe from it, it is not asking him to do anything.
// - Precedence: bulk|junk|list — the sender declaring itself bulk.
// - Auto-Submitted other than "no" (RFC 3834) — generated by a machine.
// - X-Spam-Flag: YES, X-Spam-Status: Yes — the spam filter upstream already
// decided; we do not second-guess it in the other direction.
// - X-GM-LABELS / X-Gmail-Labels containing a Gmail category — Gmail's own
// Promotions/Social/Forums/Spam classification, when the server sends it.
//
// Deliberately NOT here: sender allow/deny lists and subject keyword matching.
// Both are configuration that ages badly and both would be a place for his
// contacts to end up in a config file. If a real correspondent's mail is being
// dropped, the fix is a rule about a header, not a list of names.
//
// A junk verdict never deletes anything and never touches a flag on the server.
// It means "do not spend the model on this", nothing more.
// junkHeaders — headers whose mere presence marks bulk mail.
var junkPresence = []string{"List-Unsubscribe", "List-Id", "List-Post"}
// gmailCategories — Gmail's category labels, lowercased as they appear in
// X-GM-LABELS. "important" and "inbox" are labels too, and are NOT categories.
// Matching is by these exact tokens (substring is fine — they are namespaced
// and cannot appear in a hand-made label by accident), so a user label named
// "Social Club" is not mistaken for Gmail's Social category.
var gmailCategories = []string{
"category_promotions", "category_social", "category_forums", "category_updates",
`\spam`, `\junk`,
}
// classifyJunk returns whether the message is bulk/automated and why. The
// reason is a short header name, safe to log — it names the marker, never the
// sender or the subject.
func classifyJunk(h mail.Header) (bool, string) {
for _, name := range junkPresence {
if strings.TrimSpace(h.Get(name)) != "" {
return true, strings.ToLower(name)
}
}
switch strings.ToLower(strings.TrimSpace(h.Get("Precedence"))) {
case "bulk", "junk", "list":
return true, "precedence"
}
if v := strings.ToLower(strings.TrimSpace(h.Get("Auto-Submitted"))); v != "" && v != "no" {
return true, "auto-submitted"
}
if strings.EqualFold(strings.TrimSpace(h.Get("X-Spam-Flag")), "yes") {
return true, "x-spam-flag"
}
if v := strings.ToLower(strings.TrimSpace(h.Get("X-Spam-Status"))); strings.HasPrefix(v, "yes") {
return true, "x-spam-status"
}
labels := strings.ToLower(h.Get("X-GM-LABELS") + " " + h.Get("X-Gmail-Labels"))
for _, c := range gmailCategories {
if c == "" {
continue
}
if strings.Contains(labels, c) {
return true, "gmail-category"
}
}
return false, ""
}