Where Everybody's Crazy

Yeah, yeah, I'm not programming... but I wrote something today called SpamMonkey, which is a very very cut down ground-up reimplementation of SpamAssassin. I said I was going to do it, and I did. (I was going to call it Barcelos, or Spam<something else>, but that's another story...)

Specifically it lacks:

• Meta rules (because I can't be bothered to implement the logic in them yet)
• Conditional compilation of rules (because I haven't worked out how to emulate the plugin infrastructure yet)
• Any of the eval tests (because they're all really ugly).

Unfortunately that last one means there's no DNS BL checks, which I really do need to fix, and there's no Bayes yet. I might fix that.

OK, so why? First because the SA code is somewhat baroque, to say the least. To be fair, most of the complexity is justified, for reasons of optimization or having to handle pathological (MIME) messages. But there's not really any reason to implement your own MIME parser in this day and age. I've already done that.

Second because I want to be able to use it to test things that aren't mail (like, say, blog comments) for spaminess using the same ruleset. And since this reads SA config files, it does indeed use the same ruleset.

I might release this in a few days, but I have this horrible premonition that everyone will miss the point and complain that it's just like SpamAssassin but it doesn't do X, Y, and Z. What do you think?