Any Neural Net code in Python? I want to filter out spam email

[Remco Gerlich]

Brad Clements <bkc at Murkworks.com> wrote in comp.lang.python:
> I've been saving up all the spam messages I get for the past two months. I
> have about 1869 spam messages saved.
> 
> Now I'd like to develop a neural net based filter for my email program and
> train it to recognize these messages as spam.
> 
> I don't know much about neural networks, they just seemed to be the best way
> to go to solve this problem. Spam messages have particular characteristics
> that I can recognize (as a human), and I'm hoping to train a program to do
> the same.

Personally I feel neural networks are overkill for this sort of thing.
You're looking for keywords, so I think you're going to need a neuron for
every possible word. It might work, but I think just making some rules
manually is easier. You already list a few things you could filter on.

How many *different* mails are in that bunch of 1869? That's a pretty big
set, it's at least cool to have a nice training set for things like this :).

I haven't looked at neural nets for information filtering much, but
the paper at http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/oard94neural.html (Neural Networks
in Information Filtering and Retrieval, from 1994) is a list of references
to papers about the subject that you may find interesting (you can get the
paper in a number of formats at the top right of the page). There are some
references to Usenet filtering with neural networks.

-- 
Remco Gerlich