Akismet is a service by the team behind Wordpress, that analyzes a comment and tells you if it’s spam or not.
The corresponding Wordpress plug-in (included in Wordpress 2.0) works great: I have disabled every other anti-spam plug-in I was previously using, and Akismet has caught ~500 spam comments (with only 1 going through).
The nice thing is you can use it for your application (just get an API key and a library for your language of choice). There are 3 licenses, including a commercial one.
Being a service has one big advantage: the system learns from many sources (thousands of blogs), so if a new kind of spam message is used (e.g. one resembling natural language and with few links) the system will learn quickly (because you don’t have to do all of the training yourself).
I’m wondering if the same system or one like it could be used for emails and whether it would be better to use that instead of building a custom solution…
There are plenty of such solutions for email, spamcop does something similar, there is also razor and dcc, you can find about SpamAssassin’s network tests at http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/UsingNetworkTests
Can’t say much about their value though, I’m not using network tests due to limited resources on my mail server.
Comment by Baruch — June 7, 2006 @ 17:01
Had no idea, thanks for the pointers…
Comment by Dimitris Giannitsaros — June 7, 2006 @ 19:43