[clo-devel] Re: [lists] Re: Re: Payment Past Due, account

[Anthony Ventimiglia]

Erik Enge writes:
 > Anthony Ventimiglia <anthony at ventimiglia.org> writes:
 > 
 > > Um er "Package" in Lispspeak
 > 
 > Actually, no.  Look at Franz' FTP server (opensource.franz.com) which is
 > most definitely a package but hardly a library.  Much better would it
 > have been if Franz wrote an FTP server library and then wrote their FTP
 > server on top of it.  Then, if I thought they approach on the FTP server
 > was poor and wanted to do it differently I wouldn't have to implement
 > the library all over again.

Good point, I've always been of the mindset that libraries are the
most useful. So if I wrote a filter, it would first be a library, then
a separate filter program on top. This is what I did with the C++
library (http://libbpfl.sf.net/). This is also because Bayesian
filtering has uses well beyond simple spam filtering. 

 > In Lisp the technical difference between application and library is
 > certainly less clear than in (for example) C but the programmer still
 > have to think about how others will his software for it to become a good
 > library.

You make excellent points, I usually think of them as synonymous, but
that may reflect my personal philosophies with respect to lisp. I
usually write libraries as packages which can be built into programs
with a few top level functions.

 > > Well now you've given me incentive. The Bayesian end is pretty much
 > > complete, And writing a working filter should be pretty easy. I want
 > > to give it a HTTP frontend (via clhp) to make control easier, kind of
 > > like the way Popfile works, I could make the filter work as a daemon,
 > > which would filter every message that comes in and add an extra header
 > > indicating the "Classification" (Bayesian filter allow for more than
 > > just Spam and non-spam). Then you could use procmail to filter based
 > > on the header. I don't know how it would integrate so if you could
 > > give me some insight, I could design it to fit.
 > 
 > We use Exim at the moment and /etc/aliases to shovel mail into Mailman.
 > I think Exim has some features to redirect messages into your software
 > and then back out again.

How does mailman work, If it recieves mail the same way user mail is
delivered, then it should be trivial to pipe it through a spam filter
and procmail along the way. Then procmail could isolate spam and send
normal messages along their merry way.

-- 
(incf *yankees-world-series-losses*)