Welcome to the project page for “Project Odyssey” – an on-going research project for the development of my spam e-mail filtering solution.
Odyssey has been steadily developing for about five years, and the spam detection algorithm the project uses has not legitimately allowed even one single piece of spam to be delivered in over two years – something I am very proud of.
Not ONE, I hear you ask? Yes – not even one. It is actually possible.
Having tried using the commercially available solutions – (and found that they aren’t good enough) – I have reached the conclusion that the true blocking of spam is dependent on two things. The filter doing the blocking, and the education about spam of the user.
Truly “perfect” spam detection and avoidance really does rely on the user understanding what they do and do not want to receive in their inboxes.
In it’s current form, Odyssey is a little bloated – it’s in proof-of-concept form.
Currently I am working to more tightly integrate the algorithm with the SMTP server – (in this case, Postfix) – so that the code becomes scalable. This is the biggest issue – it does not scale beyond a very small number of users at the moment, as the spam detection code is actually not integrated with the SMTP server.
However, now that I’ve proven to myself that the algorithm works, it’s time to turn it into something that REALLY works. Check back here from time to time, and I’m sure to post updates as well as I go.