Spam Trainer simplifies the process of training spam filtering software (e.g. Spambayes, SpamAssassin or crm114) that has the ability to "learn" which messages look like good email (ham) and which ones are likely to be unsolicited (spam).
Not all email clients have Spam filtering (and training) built in, and training external filtering programs can be fiddly. Spam Trainer was written to provide easy (drag and drop) training from within the Evolution mail client, and should work just as well with any email client that supports the drag and drop protocol implemented within the GTK+ toolkit.
Spam Trainer requires GNOME, Mono 1.0 and GTK#. GNOME should be available pre-packaged for your operating system (unless you're using Windows, which isn't supported). Mono and GTK# may be available with your operating system. Otherwise they can be downloaded from the Mono web site:
http://www.mono-project.com/download/
Spam Trainer expects the dropped file to be passed to it in the form of a local URI (e.g. "file:///tmp/evolution/path/to/message"). Any email client that supports drag-and-drop in GNOME is likely to work just as well (it has been tested with Evolution 1.x and 2.x). Success/failure reports with other email clients would be most welcome.
Pre-compiled packages for your operating system may available.
Otherwise, the compilation and installation process is straightforward, though you will need to install some Mono development packages first. Compile and install Spam Trainer as follows:
$ ./configure
$ make
# make install
By default Spam Trainer will be installed into /usr/local. When installing on Ubuntu Linux (for example) I run configure like this, so that the Spam Trainer icon automatically appears in the GNOME menu:
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc
It's not very good style to install it into /usr and /etc (only your operating system's package manager should be managing the files in these directories) but it does mean that GNOME can find all the Spam Trainer files properly. Your mileage may vary.
When you run Spam Trainer a small window appears with two icons; one representing ham and the other representing spam. Dragging and dropping an email message from your email program (or some other drag-and-drop capable program) onto either icon will train your spam filter accordingly.
In order to configure Spam Trainer to work with your spam filtering software you will need to configure the commands that are used to train ham and spam messages, respectively. Right click on the main window in order to access the preferences. When entering the training commands use %f to represent the filename of the message on which you are training. For example, to use the SpamBayes sb_filter.py program to train a message as spam enter:
sb_filter.py -s < %f
If you would like to change the icons used to represent ham and spam (the defaults aren't very imaginative) just drop some PNG files over the top of the ham.png and spam.png files in the resources/ directory and re-install.