It seems impossible, but right now Im experiencing feelings of gratitude toward the legions of spammers and mailer bots that ensure that our in-boxes are never lonely.
The necessity of managing all the unwanted mail they send has become mother to an invention thats going to make it much easier for me to manage the many messages I receive that dont involve low-rate mortgages, pirated software or various enlargement offers.
Ive spent the past week running POPFile Version 0.22, an open-source Perl application that uses the same Bayesian filtering techniques to sort out junk mail and to learn how I like to organize the rest of my messages.
POPFile now supports IMAP mail, which is what I use for my work and home accounts. It comes in a Windows version and in a cross-platform version that I installed on my Linux desktop. Using POPFiles Web-based interface, I provided the application with my mail account information and set up several “buckets” into which POPFile would sort incoming messages.
With less than a week of training elapsed, POPFile is doing a great job separating messages I consider low priority from those I consider high priority.
POPFile also does a good job catching the spam thats sure to fall through the cracks of whatever server-side spam filter youre sitting behind. I highly recommend that you check out popfile.sourceforge.net to cash in on the technology dividend of the spam wars.
Check out eWEEK.coms Messaging & Collaboration Center at http://messaging.eweek.com for more on IM and other collaboration technologies.
Be sure to add our eWEEK.com messaging and collaboration news feed to your RSS newsreader or My Yahoo page