CRM114

Jesus H. Tap-Dancing Christ, I have seen the light. And it is CRM114.

A little background here. Back in 1999, a friend of mine said, "Hey, there's no free spam filtering forwarder in the world. You should write one, and then we'll figure out how to make money with it." So I did. Despammed.com was born. For the next five years or so, I learned a whole lot about how not to administer the firehose that is email. Due to lack of attention, the server crashed and burned and much of the code was lost (not the filter!) and the service, although its zombie is still on the Net, never really recovered. Because I didn't really care any more (we never had figured out how to make money with it).

In early 2007, Web spam was getting to be a hassle on a forum I had for my then-Web comic (by that time, it was already essentially in permanent hiatus, but a few friends still hung out on the forum). Xrumer had been released in November of 2006. I wrote a despammer for my forum and it worked for a while, but eventually I was forced to close the forum entirely. The release of that seems to have been on February 4, 2007.

In May of the same year, I refined some of the techniques I'd been working with, and the result was the modbot in Perl, a modular framework for applying various tests to determine the spam nature of a given post. It worked kinda well, but I couldn't drum up much interest in the wider world, and it died mostly a-borning.

OK. So that's my history in despamming. Now along comes something I never heard of: CRM114, which is a programming language invented specifically for expressing spam filters. And I'm looking at it, and I love it so much. Seriously. Also, here's a paper about it. Here's some publications by its perpetrator, William S. Yerazunis, who now works for Mitsubishi Electric and comes across to me as a really funny guy who would doubtlessly be a hoot to have a good supper with. Also, my envy for him burns with the heat of a thousand suns, because he basically seems to do all the stuff I really wish I had time to do.

So anyway. I am going to learn the shit out of CRM114.