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Mozilla Adding Spam Filters
ksheka writes "Mozilla mail now has Spam Filters, using Bayesian filtering method, no less. This is a very good thing, because it learns from the spam you receive, and constantly modifies itself, based on new spammer techniques!"
The news article makes it sound like this feature is up and running, in reality it is partially phased in - alpha stage stuff.
It will be great when it's more complete but there is a lot of work to do yet.
- Toby
Here [kuro5hin.org]. Yeah, it's basically the same thing.
Yes, and your point is? Hint: Slashdot gets most of it's stories from elsewhere.
Actually, using only the body isn't just a hack, it's a relatively new technique invented by Paul Graham that seems to produce excellent results. It makes a lot of sense: Spam is Spam because the body contains commercial or otherwise unwanted material--it's only natural that the most direct and accurate Spam filters are going to analyze the body. Bayesian classification like this is computationally tractable and appears to work. You can read more about it here.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
No they have the feedback and they know what works and what does not.
I partially agree with you. Compiling does allow you to get a slimmer lizard. However, compiling it from scratch is a real pain, and takes a long time and a lot of disk space. My point is that it's probably not worth the effort for most people. Why waste time and disk space on building a slimmed-down Mozilla if you can download a more functional precompiled version? This is why I love modularity so much; every module can be offered precompiled, and nobody needs to waste disk space.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
It is so annoying to get an e-mail without a subject. My spam filters actually bump you a little bit closer to being considered spam if there is no subject. I consider it to be a required header.
For one I sort my mail by thread, while Mozilla will use reference headers to thread messages, the fall back is the subject. Without a subject your message would be tossed in the thread with the other loosers who also forgot their subject.
The easy way to keep that dialog box from popping up when you send a mail is to...put a subject on the message.
If you want a spell checker go to the Netscape FTP server find the XPI file for the spell checker and install it.
E-mail is Outlook's domain. Not IE.
It's possible to net-install Mozilla without installing Mozilla Mail, but the default setting includes both. It's possible to net-install IE without installing Outlook Express, but the default setting includes both. Thus, it is a fair comparison.
100. Bugzilla - OK, lots of people use this, but Bugzilla != Mozilla. So it's not like Mozilla has built-in Bugzilla features... This is unrelated to the list.
I think the point of that entry was that unlike IE's bug database, which only Microsoft employees see, Mozilla's bug database is 99% open to the public (the other 1% primarily covers unfixed security vulnerabilities).
Will I retire or break 10K?
This, comibined with some clever regex filters I already had means that I can reliably get the 10% of my mail that I actually want to read.
You really want server-side filtering. I do that on my IMAP server with procmail, though not Bayesian. A quick google with "procmail bayesian filter" turns up quite a bit of interesting stuff to sift through. Of course if it's not your IMAP server, you're back to client-side solutions.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
This approach is more commonly called "Naive Bayes" classification in the field of machine learning. It is naive because it considers each word to be a feature (dimension), but it also considers each word in an email to be conditionally independent of all other words in the document (which is not true, but really useful in practice).
The author of the web page on using this technique to classify spam (Paul Graham) has a better explanation of Naive Bayes on this web page.
I've written my own naive Bayes classifier to identify spam, with less positive results than he reports. However, naive Bayes can be a very effective technique, and I can believe his results.
The two things you have to beware of when using it are "smoothing" probabilities of words you've never seen (you don't want them to always be zero, as straight naive Bayes will give you), and you need LOTS of training data for naive Bayes to work well. That means that you need to already have a fair amount of spam to identify spam well.
You can see a paper I wrote on using naive Bayes to classify hard drive failures here, or look for more stuff on naive Bayes on Google. Also, don't reinvent the wheel: Andrew McCallum has written a very good toolkit for doing these sorts of things in Bow.
Use Gotmail, which downloads your hotmail messages to an mbox-style file. Or use hotwayd which appears like a POP3 server running on localhost, and uses WebDAV to get messages from hotmail (like Outlook Express). Either way, no web-bugs will get activated.
The added advantage is that you can pipe these through procmail/spamassassin just like ordinary incoming mail, and not have to manually delete all that spam.
Preferences -> Privacy & Security -> Images, you can turn off images in mozilla, or only in mail/news.
It's called vipul's razor.
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
IE starts up quickly in Windows because it is loaded into memory at system start up and runs in the background. When you "start" the program you are simply creating a new browser window. So you suffer the program start-up overhead when the system boots, instead of each time you create a new instance.
The good news is, for those inclined to sacrifice system performance for quick browser load times, is that this option is also available in Mozilla...Look under "Preferences...Advanced" for the Quick-launch option.
:wq
I may drop Evolution in favor of Mozilla Mail.
i on/2002-August/020845.html
I tried to find out if the Evolution dev team was going to do this. The only thread I could find on the topic is here:
http://lists.helixcode.com/archives/public/evolut
Doesn't look like it's part of their vision.
Software Wars
101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that IE cannot
One simple rule for its versus it's
if i'm not mistaken you can edit the SPAM rule in mac os 10.2 mail and add additional properities to it's rules.
the default is "if not in address book and it's SPAM" send to SPAM folder.
you should be able to add a properity to that rule that says
"if not in address book and FROM: doesn't contiain XYX.COM and it's SPAM" send to SPAM folder
you just add the properities before the SPAM one.
The big problem with bayesian server-side filtering (as opposed to rule-based tools like SpamAssassin) is that baysian filtering requires a UI. The user must classify email as spam/not-spam to provide fodder for the filter. Having that UI in the mail client is the right thing to do. It would be nice if there were some protocol that the client could use to communicate that info to a server-side filter, but AFAIK no such protocol exists.
So client-side seems like the right place for bayesian filtering right now.
There are people working on this. Currently, Phoenix is the brower only app. It's lean, quick, and efficient. Bugs are still being worked out, but it's very usable right now. Also, K-Meleon is a browser that uses the Gecko rendering engine, but not the Mozilla XUL interface.
As for email/news clients, there are two, I believe. Thunderbird and Minotaur. Neither are out at all yet to use.
Th