Stefano Demiliani WeBlog

Free AntiSpam tool for Outlook

An interesting (and totally free) anti-spam tool for Outlook is SpamBayes.

SpamBayes is innovative because it's a development of a Bayesian anti-spam filter (that has the ability to learn during use), but with more improvements.

SpamBayes is not a single application. The core code is a message classifier, however there are several applications available as part of the SpamBayes project which use the classifier in specific contexts.

The table below outlines the main applications which are part of the SpamBayes distribution.

Application	Description
Outlook Plugin	A plugin for Microsoft Outlook which tightly integrates classification and training into the Outlook interface
Pop3proxy / sb_server	A mail filter which sits between the user's POP3 server(s) and the user's mail client and presents a web-based training interface
Imapfilter	A mail filter similar to pop3proxy but which talks the IMAP protocol
Hammiefilter / sb_filter	A simple mail filter suitable for embedding in a procmail environment

SpamBayes will attempt to classify incoming email messages as 'spam', 'ham' (good, non-spam email) or 'unsure'. This means you can have spam or unsure messages automatically filed away in a different mail folder, where it won't interrupt your email reading (and it's really good).

Obviously, SpamBayes initially must be trained, so you've to show SpamBayes a pile of email that you like (ham) and a pile you don't like (spam). SpamBayes will then analyze the piles for clues as to what makes the spam and ham different.

After that, when you're receiving a mail, SpamBayes compares the spam and the ham and calculates probabilities. It can then look at incoming email, extract the most significant clues and combine the probabilities to produce an overall rating of "spamminess".

I've tryed SpamBayes at work and seems to work really very good... I reccomend it to all.