Re: Paul Graham on fighting SPAM

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Mon, 26 Aug 2002, alex@emacswiki.org wrote:
> Has anybody used spam-stat.el at all?  I must confess that I have
> not yet added it to the fancy split rules myself, so perhaps we
> should first start using it, before we start improving it.

I have played with it, but have not had the time to do a lot.

> Anyway, what shall we do with spam-stat.el, now?  An ifile user
> suggested I write code to reduce the dictionary size again --
> perhaps I should remove all the words occuring less than 5 times,
> and all words whose spaminess is close to 0.5 (common words occuring
> both in spam and non-spam), and only the first few kb of all mails
> should be analyzed.  Maybe I should write a sample usage that
> updates the dictionary whenever you move mails into or out of the
> mail.spam group.  I know this is not what Teodor Zlatanov has in
> mind, but at least I think I could do it myself.

> Or should I just assign the copyright of spam-stat.el, then we can
> move it into spam.el or whatever, and people will fix it as spam.el
> gets wider usage?

It's entirely up to you, as the author of spam-stat.el.  I have no
problem with the package remaining separate from spam.el - I will
simply document the fact that users who want to use the statistics
feature can download your package and do a load-library before adding
its functions to the spam-split sequence or in the summary exit hooks.

Judging by your first paragraph, you'd rather continue your work
independently, and it would probably benefit everyone that you do so.
As long as you keep me in the loop (via gnu.emacs.sources postings or
e-mail) I will try to synchronize spam.el with changes that you make
to functionality or function names in spam-stat.el.

For those who are interested in using spam.el: I will follow up with a
separate summary to ding.

Ted