Feast your eyes on this little beauty:

This is Bayes’ formula. It is the maths behind the Bayesian filtering used by spam-catching apps like SpamSieve, SpamFire and JunkMatcher.

Process Software offers a lucid and racy explanation of how Bayes’ forumula works to keep spam out of your Inbox. You will be surprised how interesting it is. I was.

Apple Mail’s built-in Junk Filter uses a different process called “Latent Semantic Analysis”.

“Mail.app’s Junk Filter is not like the others” contains a number of links to explanations of LSA and how it differs from Bayesian filtering.spam, lsa, latent semantic analysis, bayesian filtering, junk filter, mail.app, apple mail

Mail.app‘s Junk filter is not a Bayesian one like the spam catching technology in SpamSieve and many other spam-fighting apps. Instead it uses a technique called Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA).

I’ve blogged two excellent descriptions of the way this filter works in Apple Mail before, but today came across a third explanation with the imposing title, “Bayesian Nets, Latent Semantics, Despamming and other speculations”.

The post describes the differences between Bayesian and LSA and a whole lot more. It’s over two years old, but a good read and packed full of links to other resources on spam.

[via Paul's Time Sink.]spam, bayesian filtering, Latent Semantic Analysis, LSA, mail.app, apple mail, junk filter

Apple Mail’s built-in Junk Filter is a joy to use and one of the app’s most welcome features. But how does it work?

An article on O’Reilly’s mac devcenter web site describes the technology behind the filter and how the filter works. Be amazed by reading about vector representation, semantic analysis and all the science that powers the filter, or just learn how to fine-tune the filter for your own needs.

Joe Kissel provides another explanation of the Junk filter and the tech behind it on the TidBits website.spam, mail.app, apple mail, junk filter, latent semantic analysis, lsa