[Python-Dev] New `spambayes' project on SourceForge

Barry A. Warsaw barry@zope.com
Thu, 5 Sep 2002 14:06:59 -0400


There's been a ton of press about applying Bayesian classifiers to
spam detection lately, spurred on by Paul Graham's recent paper "A
Plan for Spam"

    http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html

Tim Peters has done an incredible amount of work on our Python
implementation of this idea.  Some of the reasons why I think Tim's
work is so cool is that he's brought along his deep knowledge of
speech recognition's related issues, and his obsessive devotion to
reducing the amount of spam I ultimately have to delete <wink>.

In order to encourage more participation from the wider open source
community, we've moved the code from a backwater of the Python cvs
tree to its own project on SourceForge.  The hope is that more people
will be able to contribute to ideas, testing, and integration of the
basic algorithms with other systems such as mail daemons, mailing list
managers, and mail clients.

The project is called "spambayes" (for lack of creativity on our part
:) and is hosted here:

    http://sf.net/projects/spambayes

If you're interested in becoming a developer on the project, let me
know.  Otherwise you can of course get anonymous checkouts of the code.

There are also two mailing lists related to the spambayes project.
The first is a general discussion list:

    http://mail.python.org/mailman-21/listinfo/spambayes

and the other is a list for cvs checkin message notices:

    http://mail.python.org/mailman-21/listinfo/spambayes-checkins

Feel free to join those lists (and help be a guinea pig for Mailman
2.1 :).

Enjoy,
-Barry

PS to Python-devers: the code has been removed from
nondist/sandbox/spambayes, so you won't be able to hack on it there.
Also, please move discussion about this from python-dev@python.org to
spambayes@python.org