Bogofilter is a mail filter that classifies mail as spam or ham (non-spam) by a statistical analysis of the message’s header and content (body). The program is able to learn from the user’s classifications and corrections.
Bogofilter is or can be integrated with graphical mailers, such as KDE’s KMail, GNOME’s Evolution or Claws Mail (formerly known as Sylpheed-Claws), or it is run by a mail delivery agent (maildrop, procmail) script to classify an incoming message as spam or ham (using wordlists stored by BerkeleyDB).
In its normal mode of operation, it takes an email message or other text on standard input, does a statistical check against lists of “good” and “bad” words, and returns a status code indicating whether or not the message is spam. Bogofilter is designed with a fast algorithm, and uses the Berkeley DB for fast startup and lookups.
To classify messages as ham (non-spam) or spam, Bogofilter needs to learn from your mail. To start with it is best to have collections (that are as large as possible) of messages you know for sure are ham or spam.
This mail filter is free and open source software.
Features include:
- Processing for plain text and HTML.
- Supports multi-part MIME messages with decoding of base64, quoted-printable, and uuencoded text and ignores attachments, such as images.
- Statistical technique is known as the Bayesian technique. Bogofilter is based on Bayes’ theorem and uses it in the initial calculations and other statistical methods later.
- Uses Gary Robinson’s geometric-mean algorithm with the Fisher’s method modification to classify email as spam or non-spam.
- Cross-platform support – runs under Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, OS X, HP-UX, AIX, RISC OS, SunOS, OS/2 …
Website: bogofilter.sourceforge.io
Support: FAQ, GitLab Code Repository
Developer: David Relson, Matthias Andree, Greg Louis, and a group of open source volunteers (original version written by Eric S. Raymond)
License: GNU General Public License version 2.0
Bogofilter is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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