Bogofilter -- fast Bayesian spam filtering

Summary:

0. Important

1. What is Bogofilter?

2. Documentation

3. Installing Bogofilter

4. How to contribute

5. How to request features

6. Building & Installing Bogofilter from Source Tarball or Git

  a. Downloading

  b. Building & Installing

  c. Configuring

  d. Changing Bogofilter

7. License

0. IMPORTANT

------------

If you are using bogofilter with the Berkeley DB data base library

(which is the default, received most testing, is the most powerful of

the data base engines that bogofilter supports and hence recommended),

do read the doc/README.db file, it contains important information.

The doc/README.db file contains troubleshooting information and

requirements that should be read ahead of time so you can fix problems

quickly should they arise later.

1. What is Bogofilter?

----------------------

Bogofilter is a fast Bayesian spam filter along the lines suggested by

Paul Graham in his article "A Plan For Spam":

  http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html

with algorithmic changes suggested by Gary Robinson in:

  http://radio.weblogs.com/0101454/stories/2002/09/16/spamDetection.html

and in "A Statistical Approach to the Spam Problem":

  http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6467

This version improves on the papers by doing smarter lexical analysis.

In particular, hostames and IP addresses are retained as recognition

features rather than broken up. Various kinds of MTA cruft such as

dates and message-IDs are discarded so as not to bloat the word lists.

2. Documentation

----------------

It is recommended, although not necessary, that you install the GNU

Scientific Library (GSL) version 1.4 or newer before configuring

bogofilter. This allows bogofilter to link dynamically against a

system-wide GSL rather than statically against a shipped GSL subset,

conserving memory and disk space.

When installed, there are man pages for bogofilter, bogoutil,

bogolexer, and bogoupgrade.  Additional documentation is in

/usr/share/doc/bogofilter-x.y.z or comparable directory (depending on

your operating system).

If you've installed the source code, the  doc directory and its

subdirectories contain most of bogofilter's documentation.  In it are

a variety of README files, the xml originals for the man pages , and

other documents.  Additionally, many of the directories in the

bogofilter hierarchy have their own README files.

If you use mutt, see the bogofilter(1) manual page for helpful macros

you can add to your .muttrc.

3. Installing Bogofilter

----------------------

When updating, check the RELEASE.NOTES files.

For fresh installs, check the rest of this file and the INSTALL file.

You can safely ignore any of these compile time warnings:

warning: unused parameter ...

warning: format not a string literal, argument types not checked

4. How to contribute

--------------------

The best way to contribute to bogofilter is through the bogofilter

mailing list, bogofilter@bogofilter.org.  You can subscribe to it by

sending a message to bogofilter-subscribe@bogofilter.org and

responding to the confirmation message it sends to you.  More

information is available on the bogofilter home page at

http://www.bogofilter.org/ or http://bogofilter.sourceforge.net/

Bugs can be reported via the bogfilter mailing list or through the

issue trackers:

https://gitlab.com/bogofilter/bogofilter/issues

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=499997&group_id=62265&func=browse

If you have code to contribute, please post it on the bogofilter

mailing list or file it to one of the issue trackers (Gitlab preferred).

5. How to request features

--------------------------

Ask around in the bogofilter mailing list.  The idea may have been

already suggested, considered, accepted, rejected, ...  You won't know

until you ask!

Alternatively, you might want to hack at the code and develop the

feature on your own, which would be great!  You can then send a patch

to the list.

6. Building & Installing Bogofilter from Source Tarball or Git

--------------------------------------------------------------

  a. Downloading

  --------------

  The most recent version of this software is available at:

	http://sourceforge.net/projects/bogofilter/

  The latest stable version can be downloaded.  The development source

  is in a Subversion repository on SourceForge.  To download the latest Git

  source, cd to the directory to which you wish to download and type

  EITHER ONE of the following commands:

  git clone https://gitlab.com/bogofilter/bogofilter.git

  OR

  git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/bogofilter/git bogofilter-git

  b. Building & Installing

  ------------------------

  To compile and install the standard configuration from a tarball, use

  the following commands:

  cd bogofilter-1.2.5	[change to project directory]

  ./configure		[add configure options as required]

  make all check

  make install		[as root]

  To compile and install the standard configuration from Git, use

  the following commands:

  cd bogofilter		[change to project directory]

  ./autogen.sh		[add configure options as required]

  make install		[as root]

  Be sure to read README.git for additional preparations required.

  You will need a full set of development tools installed to be able

  to run autogen.sh, including recent automake and autoconf.

  configure does not have these requirements.

  c. Configuring

  --------------

  After using ./autogen.sh, which builds the standard configuration

  and runs "make check" to ensure it works in your environment and on

  your hardware, you might wish to further customize bogofilter for

  your use.

  Running "./configure --help" will list all the configuration

  options.  The most notable ones are, with examples:

  --prefix=PREFIX         install architecture-independent files in PREFIX

			  [default: /usr/local]

  --with-database=ENGINE  Choose database engine

                          {db|qdbm|sqlite3|tokyocabinet|kyotocabinet|lmdb}

  			  [default: db]

  CPPFLAGS=-I/opt/csw/include

			  Choose additional include file path /opt/csw/include

  LDFLAGS=-L/opt/csw/lib  Ditto, for library files

  d. Changing Bogofilter

  ----------------------

  If you make modifications to bogofilter, you may need to have a

  recent DocBook XML tool chain, the xmlto program, PassiveTeX and

  XMLTeX, recent versions of automake and autoconf.

  These requirements do not apply if you are building an unmodified

  tarball.

7. License

----------

Bogofilter is offered under the GNU General Public License,

see the COPYING file for details. Note that some parts, especially in

the contrib/ section or scripts, may be under a different license.