SpamButcher - Behind the Cleaver

The primary goal would be to solve my own spam problem. Secondarily - making some money also seemed like a good idea.

The first step was setting out some initial goals for what I thought spam email blocking software would optimally be.

1. For starters - it should block the vast majority of spam. Enough to effectively solve the end-users spam problem. Blocking 95% of unwanted spam messages seemed to be a reasonable goal.

2. Should rarely if ever block email from friends or co-workers. An occasional false-positive from an email list or newsletter may be acceptable since they are easily identified and 'whitelisted'

3. Should not require the user to update the product any more than a few times a year to maintain good performance stopping spam.

4. It should run entirely on the end-users system - and not rely on a back-end service to prevent spam (this was partially out of self-interest - I didn't want to be responsible for a server farm 24x7)

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