KTools: Spam Filter

As if the flood of normal spam isn’t bad enough, spammers are now aggravating large parts of the literate world with image-based spam and with messages that don’t contain any meaningful content at all. This new spam is a challenge for even the most sophisticated of filters. For example, the database in our lab using the Bogofilter program grew to a size of 100 MB. Receiving mail via KMail on an IBM ThinkPad T23, with a Pentium 3 1.13 GHz CPU and 768 MB RAM, became a time-consuming experience. The KMail interface freezes for the most part, as it does not call the spam filter program as a background task as of this writing [1].

It seems unlikely that the developers will find a solution to this issue before the KDE 4 release, since it would mean rewriting major parts of the program. At the same time, much junk mail remains unfiltered due to image spam and messages with meaningless content. One thing is for sure, I needed a more powerful solution.