WARNING: ifile is no longer being actively developed.

What is ifile?

Long, long ago, in a lab far, far away, I used the following to described ifile:

ifile is a general mail filtering system that works with a mail client to intelligently filter mail according to the way the user tends to organize mail. ifile uses the modern machine learning algorithm naive Bayes to classify mail documents.

ifile is different from other mail filtering programs in three major ways:

1. ifile does not require you to generate a set of rules in order to successfully filter mail
2. ifile uses the entire content of messages for filtering purposes
3. ifile learns as you move incorrectly filtered messages to new mailboxes

Now, it can be described simply as one of many "Bayesian mail filters." Though, unlike bogofilter and spamassassin, it can do n-way filtering rather than simply spam vs. non-spam.

Download

• ifile-1.3.8.tar.gz

E-mail clients

• Emacs/Gnus
  • The EmacsWiki has a summary of options for integrating ifile with emacs/gnus.
  • Jeremy Brown's ifile-gnus.el elisp library for the emacs gnus e-mail client.
• Procmail
  • Martin Macok's scripts for spam elimination with mutt/procmail/mailbox.
  • Jack Bertram's extension of Martin Macok's to general mail filtering (not just spam/non-spam).
• Pine
  • Yu-han Chang's account of how to get ifile to work with pine (see section 3)
• Slocal/.maildelivery, MH/NMH, EXMH
  • Download the mh-ifile package

Documentation

• A tutorial on using ifile.
• Karl Vogel's description of setting up and using ifile.
• Frequently Asked Questions

Mailing Lists

There is no longer an ifile mailing list, but you can see the archives.

Other Stuff

• Skip Montanaro's script for deleting a folder from .idata
• The 0.1A README
• The ChangeLog
• Read a paper about ifile:

Spam Filtering Links

• The Spammers' Compendium
• John Graham-Cummings wrote POPFile, a Naive Bayesian filtering program that makes use of many hand-crafted spam features.
• Spam Filtering Bibliography
• Paul Graham talks about spam filtering.
• ESR's bogofilter is a similar mail filter that focuses on spam filtering.
• A spam conference, January, 2003, Cambridge, MA, USA.

Mail Filtering Links

• Chris Browne's mail filtering page
• Selected researchers who have done work with mail filtering: William Cohen, Mehran Sahami
• Select is a similar mail filtering program written by Mikael Ylikoski.