SpamTUNNEL (2003)

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I recall that over New Year’s break 2002-2003 I got interested in spam and statistical filtering, so I wrote SpamTUNNEL, which I released as freeware. It got way more attention than I anticipated, getting me contacts from the MIT Media Lab and getting cited in several papers.

The timing was not an accident. Paul Graham had published “A Plan for Spam” in August 2002, and the idea that you could beat spam with simple word-frequency statistics rather than hand-written rules was suddenly everywhere. I wanted to try it myself, and I wanted it to work with whatever mail client I happened to be using, without a plugin. So instead of writing a filter for one program, I wrote a small proxy that would sit between any mail client and the mail servers and filter everything passing through.

Java on Ligiu Uiorean

SpamTUNNEL (2003)