Thomas Bayes, a Presbyterian minister and mathematician born just over 300 years ago, would be shocked to see most of the e-mail messages that bid for our attention nowadays. He would be thrilled to know, however, that his statistical inference theorem has inspired a potent counterattack. An open source project called SpamBayes has emerged as a powerful weapon in the war on spam. There are a few different implementations of SpamBayes. I'll focus here on an Outlook add-in, written by renowned Python hacker Mark Hammond. I've been skeptical about the long-term prospects for content-based e-mail filtering. But the Python-based SpamBayes engine, and Hammond's brilliant add-in (also written in Python), are rapidly making me a believer. Full story at InfoWorld.com
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2003/06/18.html#a725