Return-Path: whisper@oz.net Delivery-Date: Fri Sep 6 18:53:24 2002 From: whisper@oz.net (David LeBlanc) Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2002 10:53:24 -0700 Subject: [Spambayes] Deployment In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I think that when considering deployment, a solution that supports all Python platforms and not just the L|Unix crowd is desirable. Mac and PC users are more apt to be using a commercial MUA that's unlikely to offer hooking ability (at least not easily). As mentioned elsewhere, even L|Unix users may find an MUA solution easier to use then getting it added to their MTA. (SysOps make programmers look like flaming liberals ;).) My notion of a solution for Windows/Outlook has been, as Guido described, a client-server. Client side does pop3/imap/mapi fetching (of which, I'm only going to implement pop3 initially) potentially on several hosts, spamhams the incoming mail and puts it into one file per message (qmail style?). The MUA accesses this "eThunk" as a server to obtain all the ham. Spam is retained in the eThunk and a simple viewer would be used for manual oversight on the spam for ultimate rejection (and training of spam filter) and the ham will go forward (after being used for training) on the next MUA fetch. eThunk would sit on a timer for 'always online' users, but I am not clear on how to support dialup users with this scheme. Outbound mail would use a direct path from the MUA to the MTA. Hopefully all MUAs can split the host fetch/send URL's IMO, end users are likely to be more intested in n-way classification. If this is available, the "simple viewer" could be enhanced to support viewing via folders and (at least for me) the Outlook nightmare is over - I would use this as my only MUA. (N.B. according to my recent readings, the best n-way classifier uses something called a "Support Vector Machine" (SVM) which is 5-8% more accurate then Naive Bayes (NB) ). I wonder if the focus of spambayes ought not to be a classifier that leaves the fetching and feeding of messages to auxillary code? That way, it could be dropped into whatever harness that suited the user's situation. David LeBlanc Seattle, WA USA