Junk e-mail or spam has become the scourge of the modern computer world. It eats bandwidth. Spam is like a disease. It doesn’t care about age, religion, wealth. It doesn’t discriminate. Junk e-mail affects us all.
Spam is a daily nuisance for all of us. It doesn't matter whether you're employed or unemployed. It doesn't matter if you're a CEO of a multinational or if you're a work at home parent - spam affects us all.
In a word Bayesian spam filters are "intelligent". Bayesian spam
filters are intelligent in so far as they're capable of comparing two sets of information and acting on the result. This
is in direct contrast to the vast majority of other spam filters who use pre-built rules to decide which email is spam and which is not.
Before we start getting deep into the meat of this article it's important to explain some standard terminology to make sure the rest of this article makes sense...