Is there a high level summary that shows how SpamBayes works?
There are eight main components to the SpamBayes system: • A database. Loosely speaking, this is a collection of words and associated spam and ham probabilities. The database says “If a message contains the word ‘Viagra’ then there’s a 98% chance that it’s spam, and a 2% chance that it’s ham.” This database is created by training – you give it messages, tell it whether those messages are ham or spam, and it adjusts its probabilities accordingly. How to train it is covered below. By default it lives in a file called “hammie.db”, or (for the Outlook plugin) “default_bayes_database”. • The tokenizer/classifier. This is the core engine of the system. The tokenizer splits emails into tokens (words, roughly speaking), and the classifier looks at those tokens to determine whether the message looks like spam or not. You don’t use the tokenizer/classifier directly – it powers the other parts of the system. • The POP3 proxy. This sits between your email client (Eudora, Outlook Express, etc) and
