Version 19 of Blue Line - spam filter

Updated 2004-01-16 18:53:43

A Tcl/Tk application to preview e-mail before it hits your e-mail client. Currently Blue Line is quite useful just to see the email and easily delete it.

Blueline 2.0 - brand new - is available for first looks on the tclbuzz website. Many additions and enhancements have been made Roy Terry 16 January, 2004

http://tclbuzz.com/v0/blueline

Comments/Discussion concerning version 1.0

In future I'll be adding automated filtering based on rules and (perhaps) Bayesian analysis.

This single-file tcl app requires the tcllib module pop3, and for Windows it comes zipped with a slightly patched version of the pop3 file. Requires the excellent tcl package tablelist

Here is (version 1.0) main window http://tclbuzz.com/v0/blueline/assets/images/mainwindow-arrownotes.gif

Download from http://tclbuzz.com/v0/blueline

by Roy Terry, 8th October, 2003

escargo 13 Nov 2003 - I have started using it, but you might want to change your copyright date (otherwise it won't go into effect for another 18000 years;). Roy Terry - yeah. fixed, I guess too much java makes my zero finger twitchy :)

escargo 22 Nov 2003 - I just wanted to say that Blue Line has become my favorite first line of defense against spam and viruses now. When you do add spam and virus filtering, one feature I hope you will add as well is a way of making the system explain why a message was deleted. My e-mail client now (Forte Agent) has very powerful filtering, but no way to make it explain why a message got filtered. I have had problems with mail that I wanted to receive being deleted (or filed into a particular folder) for no apparent reason. If I have a filter rule wrong, or if a rule is matching too generally, I have no way of determining why. (I can guess and even experiment, but I cannot just get the agent to tell me.)

escargo 25 Nov 2003 - I just thought I would mention something that I find irritating. As Blue Line is processing messages (and giving its blue line progress bar), the text above the bar keeps changing in size. I find this distracting. I don't mind what it's says, but having it keep stretching (instead of just being wide enough to start with) is one of life's little annoyances. Not major, by any means, but I am always noticing it. Roy Terry - yeah me too! This is fixed and some simple rule-based processing is also in place. I'll post a rev in the next week or so then it's on to bayesian filtering... BTW, I will plan to have the filter offer any "reasons" it may have for calling a message spam - Cheers, Roy

escargo - Nice to hear about progress. I had a spam filter that I was working on (which I lost because of a recent hard disk crash), but it had a couple of white lists, one for subjects (mainly used for easy-to-identify mailing lists), and one for hosts. This saved a lot of work in spam identification. I hope your filters are pluggable. What I was imagining in my filter was having a set of filters (which could be dynamically discovered), where a filter would be passed the message summary (headers prefetched) and the filter would return a result that would indicate 1) I can't tell if it's spam, ask somebody else, 2) It's spam and here's why, or 3) It's not spam and here's why. A message could then be passed along a chain of filters until one answers 2 or 3. Users of the program could write their own filters (since filters all have the same interface) to extend the filtering any way they wanted it. I even thought that filters could be stored here on the wiki for people to download.

escargo 1 Dec 2003 - It might be interesting to contrast Blue Line with Mailbox Sweeper[L1 ] (which appears to be implemented in Java).

escargo 8 Dec 2003 - What kind of limitations does Blue Line have? When I was away from home for an extended time, and started Blue Line, it informed me about some number of messages (about 180). After filtering them, I started up my e-mail client, which then informed me that I had 300 messages (including several virus payloads that I didn't want to download). Is there an upper limit on the number of messages Blue Line can handle? Roy Terry: No known limit. I ran it up to 508 messages when my wife's mailbox got some wierd earthlink hiccup. I know of several potential "loopholes" for getting unexpected messages in your email client:

  1. A batch of messages arrives between the last time blueline refreshes and when your client empties the box.
  2. In earlier versions of the code I occasionally saw some unexplained failures to auto refresh (I no longer notice that behavior)
  3. The first version has a timeout of 50 seconds to fetch messages - that could explain what you saw (Sorry - :-/ ). The new version allows 1 second per message so it's very unlikely to timeout inappropriately.

Bottom line: should be no obvious limitation on number of messages. Though I did observe a "hang" of several seconds between when the code finished downloading 500+ messages and when they hit the tablelist display. That delay has yet to be investigated.

Also, there are times when I found when it would be useful to sort by something other than sequence number. Sorting by recipient, sender, subject, and number of lines in the message would be really handy. All that and more will be in the next release real soon now as I have it running - RT

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