Difference between revisions of "DSpam OVERVIEW"

Latest revision as of 17:04, 12 June 2009

OVERVIEW

DSPAM is an open-source, freely available anti-spam solution designed to combat unsolicited commercial email using advanced statistical analysis. In short, DSPAM filters spam by learning what spam is and isn't. It does this by learning each user's individual mail behavior. This allows DSPAM to provide highly-accurate, personalized filtering for each user on even a large system and provides an administratively maintenance free solution capable of learning each user's email behaviors with very few false positives.

While DSPAM is focused around spam filtering, many have found alternative uses for all types of two-concept document classification.

DSPAM is rapidly gaining a large support forum and being used in many large-scale implementations. Contributions to the project are welcome via the dspam-dev mailing list or in the form of financial contributions.

Many of the foundational principles incorporated into this software were contributed by Paul Graham's white paper on combatting spam, which can be found at http://paulgraham.com/spam.html. Much research and development has resulted in many new approaches being added onto the DPSAM project as well, some of which are explained in white papers on the DSPAM home page.

DSPAM can be implemented as a total solution, or as a library which developers may link their projects to the dspam core engine (libdspam) in accordance with the GPL license agreement. This enables developers to incorporate libdspam as a "drop-in" for instant spam filtering within their applications - such as mail clients, other anti-spam tools, and so on.

PLEASE NOTE: DSPAM and libdspam are distributed under the GPL license, not the LGPL. Commercial licensing is available for those who seek to redistribute DSPAM or some of DSPAM's components/libraries in their non-GPL products. Please contact [email protected] for more information about commercial licensing.

The DSPAM package is split up into the following pieces:

DSPAM AGENT

The DSPAM agent is the command center for all shell and daemon operations. If you're using DSPAM as a filtering solution, this is the 'dspam' (or dspamc) binary you're likely going to be talking to via commandline.

LIBDSPAM: CORE ENGINE

The DSPAM core processing engine, also known as libdspam, provides all critical spam filtering functions. The engine is embedded into other dspam components (such as the agent) and is responsbile for the actual filtering logic. If you're not a developer, you don't need to be concerned with this component as it is automatically compiled in with the build.

WEB UI

The Web UI (User Interface) is designed to allow end-users to review their spam quarantine and history, graphs, and to delete their spam permanently. They can also optionally use the quarantine to perform all of their training. The UI also includes some basic administrative tools to change settings and manage user quarantines.

TOOLS

Some basic tools which have been provided to manage dictionaries, automate corpus feeding, and perform other diagnostic operations related to DSPAM. Some of these include dspam_train, dspam_stats, and dspam_dump.