Spam Free Email

One of the interesting things that I have noticed while watching my latest corpus grow is the changes that are made in the score of message that are originally scored to be neutral or unknown.

I think it would be nice to recheck messages on some sort of interval and get new er scores, adjusting only neutral messages to make them either good or bad based on a newer corpus then the one they were originally scored with.

During this process it occurred to me the virus scan has some of the same issues. Most notably that the anti-virus database changes at least once a day and the last thing anyone wants is to have a virus get into their email box.

So along with re-scoring messages I am also rescanning them for viruses as well.

Either way it keep the database a bit cleaner and help reduce the user interaction with their neutral messages. Given enough newer messages in the corpus any and all neutral message will, in time, be classified either good or bad.

Recently I registered the domain name http://www.erlmail.com with the intention of using it to create a free open source email server for Erlang.

Currently it is pointing to SpamFreeEmail.com, mostly because this will be the original code base for the project.

My intention is to create a complete SMTP compliant server with IMAP4 and POP3 support. I want it to be easily distributed and highly concurrent, hence the choice of Erlang.

I have never even participated in an open source project before, so running on will be quite a learning curve for me

I have the core of the SMTP server and much of the queuing processes already designed for SFE. A decent amount of code will need to be removed from SFE as it pertains exclusively to how I have my system configured, although some of it may simply get put into configuration files.

I’m hoping that I can get the core of a server up and running within a month or so. I still need to continue developing SFE, but I think developing them concurrently will improve them both.

So if you are interested in help, let me know. If you are interested in using the final project, let me know. Either way the more interest in the project the better and faster it will get done.

I’ve been reconfiguring how some of the servers work while I’m upgrading from Fedora Core 4 to Fedora Core 5. Originally I have each of my primary server as a ram only mnesia node, but I choose to use only two of them for a while.

I’m not sure exactly how mnesia figures out which serer to get the data from, but it appears that they use a closest or fastest server algorithm that is pretty good.

Why do I say this? When I had less mnesia nodes running there each message was processed slower.

I’m assuming that the mnesia nodes notice that they have a mnesia server on the actual machine they are running on and get data at bus speeds instead of network speeds.

In the case of my anti-spam application which is actually using mnesia to control which nodes do what, the number were pretty staggering. When I had half as many nodes my speeds were twice what they were with more nodes. I put the extra nodes back up and the speeds went back down almost immediately.

I think I was reading at planet erlang about dynamically adding and removing mnesia servers from your cluster and I am seriously considering this right now.