Graham's spam filter (was Lisp to Python translation criticism?)

[Erik Max Francis]

"John E. Barham" wrote:

> But I don't think that a pickled dictionary/database would be
> unmanageably
> huge, even w/ a large set of input messages, since the rate of growth
> of the
> "vocabulary" (i.e., set of tokens) would slow as more messages were
> input. The spam probability database in particular is smaller than the
> "good" and
> "bad" ones since it has a frequency threshold.

That's true, but if your spam filter acts as a standalone program (i.e.,
one that is simply invoked from your .qmail and/or .forward file), it's
going to have to read that probability database each time an email comes
in.  Updating the database is much more intensive, but can happen much
less often.

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