Spam Free Email

I wanted to save some of the data in the anti spam system in a permanent storage, but I didn’t want to flood my database with useless information, so I’ve always intended to save this data in XML.

When I was looking at Erlang and read that it had built in XML support, this made me VERY happy

A few weeks ago I attempted to make a profile into XML using Xmerl and I wasn’t as successful as I would have liked, but I just got it finished today. The reason for the failure in my first attempt was my lack of understanding for records in Erlang, not any real problem with the language. Except the poor documentation and limited examples.

Now that I understand that you create a series of record which with which you build the XML format that you desire then run the rather complex record through Xmerl to output your XML it a rather simple process.

The real test are still to come, which is a real email being processed and the profile being written to disk and then reading the XML back in and recreating my internal records from what I read from disk. At this point it’s more a matter of getting a few test message through the system then anything else.

While I’m designing this system I keep thinking of things that have happened at different client sties and with my own past email and trying to solve those problems as well.

One problem that I think I have a chance at helping with is when someones email box is completely lost.

I have always intended on archive messages off of the system after a certain point to conserve hard drive space. Also, after two weeks all message are marked as trashed, which means they are ready to be archived to more prominent media, currently I’m thinking of using DVDs.

For a small month fee I would be willing to allow the email to stay on the drives for longer, say three months instead of two weeks, or for a one time fee we could pull the older emails off of the archives and put them back onto the main system.

Then whenever emails message were wanted could be forwarded again within the user interface. Most likely only forwarding the messages that were marked as good before they were archived.

I’ve had more then one situation where the email had been lost and the user would have been quite happy with the most current two weeks, but with newer regulations and compliance issues this would be a benefit to other people as well.