May 11, 2003
Jon Udell on SpamBayes

Jon Udell: SpamBayes rocks:

In an upcoming InfoWorld article, which will post next Friday and appear in print the following week, I review the SpamBayes filtering engine and Mark Hammond's brilliant Outlook addin. Thanks to this remarkable open source duo, I am ready to declare victory on spam.[...]

It's hard, at first, to see how SpamBayes can possibly work. When you look at a message from SpamBayes' point of view, you see a different and far more granular approach than SpamAssassin's, which reports things like:

PENIS_ENLARGE (2.2 points) BODY: Information on getting a larger penis
SUB_FREE_OFFER (0.3 points) Subject starts with "Free"
US_DOLLARS (2.0 points) BODY: Nigerian scam key phrase (million dollars)

SpamBayes doesn't know any of these rules. It just knows what I want to see, and what I don't want to see. It knows because I show it a bunch of positive and negative examples up front, and then refine its understanding of my wishes continuously as I process my (surprisingly few) MaybeSpam messages.

I am so going to test this out when I in the near future have to move from Lotus Notes to Outlook at work. Collaborative tools like Cloudmark and rule-based systems like SpamAssassin can only go so far. Bayesian filtering is the future.

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I hope that SpamBayes worked for you. I wanted to let you know that my company decided to make a consumer-friendly version of the software that it easy to install and use. You can find it at www.inboxer.com. I hope that you will try that and give me some feedback.

Posted by: L Strassman on July 21, 2003 12:09 AM
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Legends of the Sun Pig: SpamBayes (May 17, 2003 05:08 PM)
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Shortly after giving up on the SAProxy anti-spam tool the other week, I found an alternative tool that is doing the job very nicely: SpamBayes. (Big, big tha...

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