We're looking for people to volunteer and make code contributions. Patches, code, perl, regression tests, rules, you get the picture. You'll have to send in a [http://www.apache.org/licenses/#clas Contributor License Agreement] before it can be accepted, but that's easy.
You'll need to download the latest version of SpamAssassin from SVN: DownloadFromSvn
So, what are we looking for right now? (Note: This has a tendency to rapidly get out of date. Subscribe to the dev MailingLists so you'll stay up to date, and let us know if you're planning on doing something big so we don't duplicate effort or end up wasting anyone's time.)
The Top N items
Documentation
- We need people to help improve the documentation, to improve its accuracy, completeness, and clarity. BetterDocumentation
- If you also know perl, you can also read our code to ensure the documentation agrees with what the code does, or to write man pages for perl modules that don't currently have one (see man perlpod).
- This wiki is not nearly as complete or as useful as we'd like to! Please, help us! You can edit any page on the wiki, just log in! UserPreferences
- There's a lot of stuff in the masses/ directory of the tree that has essentially no documentation.
New Rules
- We are looking for people to help us write new rules, and help us add rules written by others (i.e. rules from CustomRulesets, with permission of course) into our code base. A good knowledge of SpamAssassin and experience writing rules would be useful. Let us know if you're interested by sending mail to the dev mailing list (MailingLists). Generally the developers are focused more on code issues rather than rules, so the more help we get in the rules department means we have more time to devote to writing code. (We want to make this easier and better – RulesProjectPlan)
If you simply want to suggest a number of rules, please open a ticket in [http://bugzilla.spamassassin.org/ Bugzilla].
Rule Quality
- We rely on individuals donating CPU time to run a NightlyMassCheck to help with our rule development. All this entails is keeping an accurate corpus of ham and spam and using some CPU time every night! We are especially in need of people receiving mail in languages other than English.
Code
Bug Fixes
Log into [http://bugzilla.spamassassin.org Bugzilla] and look for bugs that you can fix. Fix it, and attach a patch (from latest SVN) to the bug report. See also UsingBugzilla.
Reduce Resources
- Submit code to speed something up without breaking anything. Minimum is probably about a 1% speed-up in overall check speed.
AutoWhitelist needs AutoWhitelistExpiry [http://bugzilla.spamassassin.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3082 bug 3082] and bayes_seen databases need to have automatic expiry.
Bayes
- Code and corpus tests that for ramping up the probability for previously unseen tokens. This could be done either heuristically or by keeping real counts of unseen tokens in the Bayes token database. The idea is that words that have never been learned before get high probabilities.
- Custom database file and code for faster performance and space savings (probably to be compared against qdbm and tdb since they look most promising right now as non-custom databases).
- Bi-grams: that is, multi-word windowing as used in CRM-114, using two-word tokens (or possibly even higher). Not sure this will provide much higher accuracy now that spammers are using whole-phrase bayes poisoning, though. (JustinMason)
Implementing Dobly noise-reduction - [http://bugzilla.spamassassin.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3078 bug 3078].
Dynamically determining the autolearning thresholds based on incoming email rather than using hard-coded numbers. See [http://bugzilla.spamassassin.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1829 bug 1829] for more.
Other ideas
- Translation : translation of rule descriptions, the manual, the website in other languages
Feedback button : client side button to enable a one touch feedback for users to recategorized a message (false positive or negative to correct state). This is a joint project between Spamassassin and Camram [http://www.camram.org]. It would also be usable by other server resident anti-spam systems. Contact [EricJohansson] for more details
[http://bugzilla.spamassassin.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=4560 Bugs marked as 'nice to have']; general feature requests that aren't urgent, but would be cool to have