Some time ago we implemented a basic spam filter for Ticketish. Nevertheless, those pesky spammers continued to push through their mail. No more. We’ve implemented a full-blown bayesian spam filter for all Ticketish accounts. If you’ve never heard of bayesian filtering, a great place to start is Paul Graham’s article A Plan for Spam.

To get the most out of the filter you need to train it. When using Ticketish, you’ll see some new items in the drop-down for managing multiple tickets: Spam and Train Not Spam. Start by selecting a whole group of tickets that aren’t spam, and train them so. Then, make sure you mark all spam tickets as spam instead of just deleting them. Over time, Ticketish will become very accurate at determining what’s spam and what’s ham.

Every Ticketish account is trained separately. This is important because what’s spam for some might be ham for others. All accounts start with a clean slate, so it’s up to you to train appropriately. We’ve developed the spam filter as a RES Tful web service, so expect to see it pop up in our other applications as well.