[Spambayes] Deployment

Tim Peters tim.one@comcast.net
Fri, 06 Sep 2002 15:43:56 -0400


[Guido]
> Takers?  How is ESR's bogofilter packaged?  SpamAssassin?  The Perl
> Bayes filter advertised on slashdot?

WRT the last, it's a small pile of Windows .exe files along with
cygwin1.dll.  The .exes are cmdline programs.  One is a POP3 proxy.  If I
currently have an email server named, say, mail.comcast.net, with user name
timmy, then I change my email reader to say that my server is 127.0.0.1, and
that my user name on that server is mail.comcast.net:timmy.  In that way the
proxy picks up both the real server and user names from what the mail reader
tells it the user name is.

This is an N-way classifier (like ifile that way), and "all it does" is
insert a

    X-Text-Classification:  one_of_the_class_names_you_picked

header into your email before passing it on to your mail reader.  The user
then presumably fiddles their mail reader to look for such headers and "do
something about it" (and even Outlook can handle *that* much <wink>).

The user is responsible for generating text files with appropriate examples
of each class of message, and for running the cmdline tools to train the
classifier.