Re: Select Announment

On 20 Oct 2002, Clemens Fischer wrote:

> ok.  there are things missing from ifile many wish for, like decoding
> the common transport-encodings of messages for the many spams avoiding
> detection by base64'ing themselves.  is this easy with select, i mean,
> is there a module for this?

In Select this is done by the file rfc822.c (which btw was taken from the 
program mairix, so I am no expert in this area). However, it also does 
more stuff, like parsing mime parts. This approach is not suitable for 
ifile. It seems like ifile (for efficiency reasons) keeps as little as 
possible of a message in memory when lexing it. The good news is that 
base64 is very simple to decode and it can be done in-memory. The hard 
part is to know where the encoded sections begin. I guess ifile could get 
away with just looking for the 'Content-Transfer-Encoding:' header lines.


> depending on the modularity and programming style and documentation
> (you know what i mean), this could be easily improved.  on a scale
> {bad, medium, good}, what would you call the commentation of your
> code?

My programming style is quite object oriented, which should make it easy 
to understand, but at the same time a little unorthodox because c was not 
designed for OO.
Most of the code has doxygen style comments, but they aren't as useful as 
they could be. On that coarse scale I would rate it medium.


> > This is not an attempt to create a competitor to ifile. I merely
> > release this in case someone might find some use for it. I don't
> > know if I will continue developing it.
> 
> again, this bothers me a little.  how about really writing a simple
> application based on `select', so i can pipe messages through it and
> have it determine if it is spam?  i think this would make many people
> "hungry", although applying select to mere spam-detection might be
> underestimating its capabilities.

Making people "hungry" is not currently a goal of mine. I intentionally 
wanted to sound a little negative so that only the most interested would 
care to look at it.
I have not looked much at the problem of spam detection. Before trying to 
use Select for this, it will definitely need the ability to do feature
selection.
Paul Graham's `A Plan for Spam' seems to have caused an inflation in spam 
filtering programs (http://www.paulgraham.com/filters.html). I am sure one 
of these will be better than Select for such purposes.

--
Mikael


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