Tech Team Newsletter - Volume 6 Issue 1

Tech Team: In the Trenches

January 2008 Volume 6 Issue 1

Table of Contents

Clean up your spam

SpamBayes
A program called SpamBayes, a free, open-source program, sorts your “spam” mail from your “ham” mail (that which you want to keep). It also creates a third pile of mail that it’s unsure of, and flags it for you to decide. The way it works is far beyond what most people would understand, other than mathematicians, but in the simplest terms it uses a statistical algorithm to handle the sorting for you.

Before you can use SpamBayes to act as your mail sorter, you train it on how you like your mail sorted by moving real emails to “spam” and “ham” folders (don’t worry, you don’t have to use these names). The great thing about this program is that it learns from you the more you use it. It compares each new “unclassified” message against what it’s learned in training, and decides where the message should fall. If you’d like to try this out on your emails, or just want to learn more about it, try this link.