[Spambayes] Spam Bayes use in a corporation

Tony Meyer tameyer at ihug.co.nz
Wed May 19 19:52:26 EDT 2004


> I work in a corporation with 5000 PC's and I was
> checking out your Anti-Spam software, SpamBayes.
> I like it.  I noticed it was free.  I don't propose
> to use it on all of our PC's just 50 or so PCs, the 
> IT staff only.  For us to use it would we need to pay
> you at all?  Is there special treatment for corporation
> or are we treated the same as a normal single user? 

One user or 5 million users, it's all the same to us (i.e. there is no
charge).  You can read the license (or forward it to those concerned) if you
like, which says the same thing, but in many more words <wink>.  (You can
even repackage it and sell it yourself if you like - it's very
unrestrictive).

<http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/spambayes/spambayes/LICENSE.txt?view=
markup>

(A copy of this is included with the source archive, and probably ought to
be with the binaries.  I'll look into that).

> I provided a link to the IT staff and a few bit my head of,
> they are partial to IHateSpam and a few are concerned legally.

Legally (in terms of using the software, anyway) there are no worries at all
(although you don't gain any rights to sue us if something goes wrong, which
maybe you can do with commercial software in the US, I don't know).

I know almost nothing about IHateSpam, but if I understand correctly, it's
basically just whitelisting, yes?  (i.e. it filters out mail from people you
don't know).  This is a fairly weak approach, but popular :)  SpamBayes
doesn't have any whitelisting (the very long story is in the FAQ), but if
you really wanted it you can purchase InBoxer which is a spambayes-based
product (one of the initial developers did the repackage-and-sell things as
above) that does have a few extra things like whitelisting.

In any case, if you're doing client-side filtering, letting them all use
their own shouldn't be a problem.

=Tony Meyer




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