Introduction

dbacl is a UNIX/POSIX command line toolset which can be used in scripts to classify a single email among one or more previously learned categories.

dbacl(1) supports several different statistical models and several different tokenization schemes, which can be adjusted to trade in speed and memory performance for statistical sophistication. dbacl(1) also permits the user to select cost weightings for different categories, thereby permitting simple adjustments to the type I and type II errors (a.k.a. false positives, etc.). Finally, dbacl(1) can print confidence percentages which help decide when a decision is ambiguous.

dbacl(1) is a general purpose text classifier which can understand email message formats. The tutorial explains general classification only. It is worth reading (of course :-), but doesn't describe the extra steps necessary to enable the email functionality. This document describes the necessary switches and caveats from first principles.

You can learn more about the dbacl suite of utilities (e.g dbacl, bayesol, mailinspect, mailcross) by typing for example:

% man dbacl