I try not to get too passionate about things around here, so I welcome your contribution. You are correct though, after a couple of days of discussion, the solution to this need does appear to exist.
I have a great appreciation for your skill, and your willingness to share both insight and code (open source). If I was a programmer, I would probably be spending my time playing with your code as opposed to playing with filters in Declude.
While none of this is a technical requirement of mine at the moment, there's lots of opportunity I think for someone to make use of the things that have appeared in this thread. In going back to the "don't have the right cable" analogy, it would be great to have a backup MX that didn't require IMail (or another full mail server), and I think that could be done within MS SMTP without needing to re-create the wheel, and maybe more efficiently. On my wishlist would be the following:
1) Envelope rejection (and all that comes with it).
2) SMTP AUTH (so it can co-exist on the same server as IMail, and handle hosted accounts with redundancy).
3) An external application handler that would allow for things like Declude JunkMail, Virus, and Message Sniffer.
4) A message splitter, so actions can be based on individual addresses instead of individual messages.
If you guys could work this out, Declude in combination with Message Sniffer could truly go multi-platform (as far as Windows mail servers go). Who knows, maybe MS SMTP has some serious issues that would make you want to avoid it.
BTW, I'm looking forward to the 3.0 features. Bayesian filtering with Sniffer's rule base I believe will significantly strengthen your system, though I would like to see your customer submitted data grow so that the rule strengths can become more accurate. Hopefully this will allow one to tune their system to their own definition of what spam is, right now it's tough in general for us guys that want to accept virtually all E-mail from sources that maintain direct relationships.
I've taken to creating my own database for managing this information in 10 different categories, which then outputs "credit" files for Declude to use. I'm now thinking that your solution may be more efficient, and sometimes more accurate because of greater filtering capability, though it can't handle things like reverse DNS entries and the SMTP envelope sender...I'll have to give it some thought. Right now these lists are short, and Declude easily handles them in custom filter form.
Matt
Pete McNeil wrote:
Sorry about that - I seem to have stepped into a bit of a tiff. I was skimming and saw a Sniffer reference and jumped in - I shouldn't do that (I should get more sleep). At any rate, the pattern matching engine can run at any point... Sniffer as it is packaged now runs after submission, but the engine can easily be used up-front during the SMTP conversation before or after DATA. That's just not how it's currently packaged.
The pattern matching engine came from my robotics research and was later adapted to fast interpreted scripting engines in he early 80s (When cpus and memory were slow and bulky). The concept for robotics was that a complex hierarchical reflex mechanism capable of real-time responses would be continually tuned by slower analysis engines. What is now inside Message Sniffer was once designed to interpret a wide array of sensor data and produce complex, directed real-time responses under the guidance (symbiotically anyway) of a goal seeking machine learning system. It was a kind of autonomic nervous system with a bit of brain-stem attached.
If anybody cares to take the technology to the SMTP end of an email application (or even level 3 routing / filtering / switching) it can be done extremely well... We have to start somewhere though... So we filter spam - go figure.
Anyway, as has been pointed out, for this application there are tools available that need no repackaging or development. (even if it might be fun)
Best, _M
At 11:46 PM 2/10/2004, you wrote:
Pete,
Everything that Sniffer does is after submission, so it really wouldn't apply.
It could be adapted to any application where a rapid recognition and response to data patterns is required. For example, picking an email address out of an SMTP envelope, or for that matter implementing the entire protocol (though that might be a silly thing to do). It does spam filtering after submission right now just because it's packaged that way. (I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way... Jessica Rabit)
--Sandy
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