Spam Bayes is an open source project at source forge looking at detecting spam based on statistical methods. Spam Bayes can be implemented in several foms to detect spam, the most famous of which is the form of an outlook plug-in which when installed, works along with outlook, filters and diverts spam into a separate spam folder before they enter your inbox. Spam Bayes uses a statistical method called the Bayesian method to detect spam. The Bayesian method or algorithm was developed by Thomas Bayes an English Clergyman who brought about a logic in decision making based on inference based on knowledge of prior events. Spam Bayes which uses the Bayesian method to determine whether an email is spam or not, calculates a probability of whether the data in the incoming mail matches a bunch of previously classified or marked data. In simple terms if you have a bunch of emails that you have already marked as spam and the incoming mail matches those emails, then the incoming mail is also marked as spam.
How effective Spam Bayes is in correctly trapping spam messages and not marking legitimate messages as spam and vice versa hugely depends on the amount of already marked spam messages it has to compare with. In other words Spam Bayes gets trained as it gets to process more and more messages. So the first couple of days after you install Spam Bayes you need to train it in marking spam messages as spam (ones that it lets through without capturing) and marking legitimate messages as not spam (the ones it wrongly marks and redirects as spam). Also if you already have a folder of spam messages previously filtered by some other spam filter, you can point Spam Bayes to that folder, it will scan those spam messages and get trained. It just takes a couple of days patience and after that you have a mighty spam warrior in hand which makes very little mistakes, much less than many other commercial applications like Norton Anti-Spam etc. And Spam Bayes is totally free, open source project, free to download, use or modify to your needs. It hogs much less resources than many other spam filters, its highly configurable and very very accurate after its initial training. It keeps training with every mail it processes and thus it gets better and better with age
Download Spam Bayes Outlook plug-in from source forge. It works on any version of Outlook above outlook 2000 and above any windows above windows 98. Spam Bayes does not with outlook express (sorry ). For detailed information on the installation process, click here. For step by step instruction on how to install Spam Bayes Click Here . For detailed configuration information Click here.