« Make money, fast! | Main | Updates »
April 15, 2005
Spam, POPFile and donations
For the past week I've been playing with POPFile, a free bayesian e-mail filtering product which can be tought to recognize more than just spam. Actually, the ideea is that while teaching it to better recognize non-spam e-mails, POPFile becomes better at reporting what is spam. How does it work? Well, POPFile is a POP3 proxy which employs a set of "buckets", roughly a set of containers for distilled e-mails. The containers are shaped by pointing e-mails to them, as in "here, this one's work related" or "look here you silly piece of software, this one's personal, not spam!". As you've already guessed, the results I've been getting for the past week are contradictory. I'm still hoping they will get better in time, though.
However, most interesting of all, POPFile shows a scary ability of recognizing the viruses arriving in my fully unprotected e-mail account, be them either PE files, or zipped archives containing copies of the e-mail worm. To give you some rough data, after training it on no more than three infected e-mails, and explaining that those pictures from my friends at FCB are _NOT_ viruses, POPFile happily detected every one and single virus which arrived into my account accordingly. The antivirus of the future? Maybe.
Last but not least, a friend of mine was very unhappy this morning because he doesn't have the skills (and the body) to earn many merry buckets of money by posing naked on the beach. Worry less my friends, an alternative is already on the way:
Posted by Costin Raiu at April 15, 2005 2:04 PM
Comments
Really nice piece of software, it's about the same how Thunderbird recognizes every virus I get in my inbox, and believe me, i get 20+ viruses each day :)
Posted by: Stefan Tanase at April 15, 2005 2:04 PM