Re: If anybody wants to make something in Ada but do not know what

[Wesley Groleau <wesgroleau@despammed.com>]

Preben Randhol wrote:
> Then perhaps a Bayesian Spam filter could be a nice challenge. Or if
> somebody are heading a university student project/diploma work it could
> a suitable project? 

I've thought about doing a variation of this,
but I just don't have the time.

I really believe that if enough people did this,
spam would cease to be profitable and die out.

Unfortunately, there will never be enough people
doing it, for the same reasons as why most of us
are going to be informed once a year for the rest
of our lives that there's going to be a five-cent
tax on every e-mail (maybe that would be a good
thing--it's cheaper than a stamp and it would stop
spam).

A bayesian filter would keep its user from seeing
the spam.  There are already numerous decent
implementations of the idea, so one in Ada would
not go very far, _unless_ it offered a significant
new feature.

In my opinion, this new feature would be for
the statistical database to be kept ON THE SERVER.
Once your database got built up enough to reject
spams, you not only would not see it, you would
save the bandwidth of pulling it down to your computer.

Bayesian filters must scan the whole message,
thus current implementations require you to download
the whole message.

If an e-mail client or plugin was capable of
sending "Message ID #$%^#$%^# was spam" and
the server could update the database accordingly,
that would be really cool.

If someone has the time to tackle a project like
this, I'd be happy to share some of the details
I've already thought of.  Unfortunately, it would
require the cooperation of the ISP to run it.