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I've been using popfile for years. Works great! Try it.

POPFile classifies email. Not just spam and not-spam, either, but into any number of categories you choose (personal, business, etc.). The more email you feed it, the better it gets at automatically classifying it.

Somewhat off topic but it may interest some of you that the book's author also created the open source project POPFile, a popular bayesian spam filter featured previously featured in a story here on Slashdot.

I don't have any data to back this up, but it seems to me that people are migrating from small provider companies to big internet provider companies - and their e-mail is going together. And it also seems to me that all those big companies have good e-mail filters (or they're getting one that will be good in a small period of time). If that's true, spam will face a dead end pretty soon.

Even if you stay with a small provider company with your personal e-mail, there are many good solutions to avoid spam. I used Popfile for a long time and it worked pretty well.

Either way, if people will go to their spam box and click that viagra ad, it will be their problem. It doesn't affect me anymore.

Back in the mists of POPFile time a developer came along and wanted to work on the HTML of POPFile's UI (made it HTML 4.01 and CSS1 compliant) and I said "If you want to work on it then you need to do that PLUS you need to make it pass the Bobby Accessibility Guidelines".

He did all three and I have heard from users that POPFile works well with screen readers. I'm not sure about JAWS in particular.

It wasn't particularly onerous to get the Bobby AA mark for the software and I'm always happy to have another satisfied user.

John.

I happily run POPFile (http://popfile.sf.net/ http://www.getpopfile.org/). Perl-based, acts as a proxy. I can't run SA on some of my mail accounts (work, contractual jobs, etc). It's a basic word filter, and lets you see/change how words rate. It also explains its decision process to help you tweak it, for instance, any email with "penis" for my setup is 99.99999% spam.

Why does DSPAM get front page treatment when the latest POPFile release (which now handles POP3, IMAP, SMTP and NNTP filtering) and has an XML-RPC external interface, supports different databases, etc. etc. gets rejected as a story?

Perhaps it's because I don't tend to make super-wild claims about POPFile's accuracy? Or come up with cool marketing names for the internal technology?

POPFile's the only Bayesian filter that can:

1. Do more than spam vs. anti-spam and
2. Filter POP3, IMAP, SMTP and NNTP (that's right Usenet news)

Do I have an axe to grind with Jonathan and DSPAM? No, it's a cool project. Does it annoy me that /. has recently turned into some combination of Freshmeat and PC Magazine? Yes.

John.

I tested Yelp! out with my own email address and POPFile classified each Yelp! message as spam.

I don't see any reason to change POPFile's thinking on the subject :-)

John.