Working Bayesian Mail Filter

zonker writes "A real, working honest to god Bayesian spam filter. I've been waiting for something like this for a while (since I first read Paul Graham's research paper on this very topic a few weeks ago). Well here's POPFile, a small but extremely effective Perl script that runs on just about any system Perl does. After just a little training was I able to get very effective filtering out of it. From what I understand the new email client that comes with OS X Jaguar has a feature similar to this, but I don't know if it is true Bayesian. Hopefully this kind of feature will become more prevalant in client software as I see the Google results for it are growing."

Comments

Mozilla in Process of adding Bayesian filter

[AT]

The mozilla mail client is getting a Bayesian mail filter, too. See http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=163188 . Unfortunately, it probably won't show up until after version 1.2 is released.

Bayesian? Wow!!! I'm sooo excited. (Irony!)

[davids-world.com]

A true Bayesian filter, wow. Let's face it, statistical classifiers based von Bayes' formula are not really state of the art. They make false assumptions about the data (independence of features).

More intelligent classification algorithms can solve non-linear problems far better. Check out Kernel Machines and, somewhat older, Maximum Entropy models.

Enough nerd talk for today :-)