SPHERECL(1)

NAME
sphercl - a spam header reweighting classifier for binary email filtering.

SYNOPSIS

spherecl [-@] -C category1:category2 [-l category] [FILE]...

spherecl -V

DESCRIPTION

THIS TOOL IS NOT READY FOR USE. IT IS A WORK IN PROGRESS.

spherecl is a (binary) Bayesian email classifier. It expects one or more FILE(s) containing single email messages in RFC2822 format, and outputs for each a best guess category name, which is either category1 or category2. If the -l switch is used, spherecl learns the messages in FILE(s) as examples of the category (which must be one of category1 or category2), rather than classifying the messages.

spherecl in fact delegates some of its work to dbacl(1) behind the scenes. Essentially, it modifies the dbacl scores to retroactively give more weight to header tokens in such a way as to try to maximize the binary classification ROC score.

Because spherecl must make certain assumptions about the dbacl output, it contains a hardcoded list of command line options for dbacl. These options cannot be adjusted, however it is possible to pass additional options to dbacl if desired (not recommended).

EXIT STATUS
The normal shell exit conventions aren't followed (sorry!). When using the -l command form, spherecl returns zero on success, nonzero if an error occurs. When using the -c form, spherecl returns a positive integer corresponding to the best category. If an error occurs, spherecl returns zero.

OPTIONS

-@  This is a marker switch. It can be used to tell spherecl to stop analyzing switches that follow the marker. These switches will be passed on to the dbacl child process verbatim. Note that spherecl expects the mandatory -l or -c switches to be used before -@. Use with caution.

-C  This switch is mandatory. It identifies the binary model uses by spherecl.

-l  When this switch is used, spherecl considers each FILE to be a mail message that must be learned as an example of category. Note that when this switch is absent, spherecl will classify each FILE as one of category1 or category2.

USAGE

See the documentation for dbacl regarding email filtering.

ENVIRONMENT

DBACL_PATH
    When this variable is set, its value is prepended to every category filename which doesn't start with a '/' or a '.'.

SOURCE

The source code for the latest version of this program is available at the following locations:

http://www.lbreyer.com/gpl.html
http://dbacl.sourceforge.net

AUTHOR

Laird A. Breyer <laird@lbreyer.com>

SEE ALSO

dbacl(1), bayesol(1), hmine(1), hypex(1), mailcross(1), mailfoot(1), mailinspect(1), mailtoe(1)