IFILE(1)							   User Commands							  IFILE(1)

NAME

       ifile - core executable for the ifile mail filtering system

SYNOPSIS

       ifile [-b file] [-q|-Q] [-g] [-k] [-o] [-v num] [lexing options] file ...
       ifile -c -q|-Q [-T threshold] [-b file] [-g] [-k] [-o] [lexing options] file ...
       ifile [-b file] [-d folder] [-i folder|-u folder] [-g] [-k] [-o] [-v num] [lexing options] file ...
       ifile -r [-b file]

DESCRIPTION

       ifile  is a mail filter client that uses machine learning to classify e-mail into folders/mail boxes.  The algorithm that it uses is called
       Naive Bayes.   Basically, naive bayes considers each document an unordered collection of words and classifies by matching the document dis-
       tribution with the most closely matching folder/mailbox distribution.

OPTIONS

       -b, --db-file=file
	      Location to read/store ifile database.  Default is ~/.idata

       -c, --concise
	      equivalent of "ifile -v 0 | head -1 | cut -f1 -d".  Must be used with -q or -Q.

       -d, --delete=folder
	      Delete the statistics for each of files from the category folder

       -f, --folder-calcs=folder
	      Show the word-probability calculations for folder

       -g, --log-file
	      Create and store debugging information in ~/.ifile.log

       -i, --insert=folder
	      Add the statistics for each of the files to the category folder

       -k, --keep-infrequent
	      Leave in the database words that occur infrequently (normally they are tossed)

       -l, --query-loocv=folder
	      For each of the files, temporarily removes file from folder, performs query and then reinserts file in folder.  Database is not mod-
	      ified.

       -o, --occur
	      Uses document bit-vector representation.	Count each word once per document.

       -q, --query
	      Output rating scores for each of the files

       -Q, --query-insert
	      For each of the files, output rating scores and add statistics for the folder with the highest score

       -T, --threshold=threshold
	      When used with both -c and -q, output the two highest ranking categories if their score differs by at most threshold /  1000,  which
	      can  be  used  to  detect  border cases.	When used with -q only and any threshold > 0, output the score difference percentage.  For
	      example,
		     ifile -T1 -q foo.txt
	      might result in
		     spam -15570.48640776
		     non-spam -18728.00272369
		     diff[spam,non-spam](%) 9.21
	      If so, then
		     ifile -T93 -q -c foo.txt
	      will result in
		     foo.txt spam,non-spam
	      whereas
		     ifile -T92 -q -c foo.txt
	      will result in
		     foo.txt spam

       -r, --reset-data
	      Erases all currently stored information

       -u, --update=folder
	      Same as 'insert' except only adds stats if folder already exists

       -v, --verbosity=num
	      Amount of output while running: 0=silent, 1=quiet, 2=progress, 3=verbose, 4=debug

       Lexing options:

       -a, --alpha-lexer
	      Lex words as sequences of alphabetic characters (default)

       -A, --alpha-only-lexer
	      Only lex space-separated character sequences which are composed entirely of alphabetic characters

       -h, --strip-header
	      Skip all of the header lines except Subject:, From: and To:

       -m, --max-length=char
	      Ignore portion of message after first char characters.  Use entire message if char set to 0.  Default is 50,000.

       -p, --print-tokens
	      Just tokenize and print, don't do any other processing.  Documents are returned as a list of word, frequency pairs.

       -s, --no-stoplist
	      Do not throw out overly frequent (stoplist) words when lexing

       -S, --stemming
	      Use 'Porter' stemming algorithm when lexing documents

       -w, --white-lexer
	      Lex words as sequences of space separated characters

       If no files are specified on the command line, ifile will use standard input as its message to process.

       -?, --help
	      Give this help list

       --usage
	      Give a short usage message

       -V, --version
	      Print program version

       Mandatory or optional arguments to long options are also mandatory or optional for any corresponding short options.

FILES

       ~/.idata
	      ifile database (default location).  See FAQ included in ifile package for description of database format.

AUTHOR

       Jason Rennie <jrennie@csail.mit.edu> and many others.  See the ChangeLog for the full list.

EXAMPLES

       Before using ifile, you need to train it.  Let's say that you have three folders, "spam", "ifile" and "friends", and the  following  direc-
       tory structure:

	      /--+--spam----+--1
		 |	    +--2
		 |	    +--3
		 |
		 +--ifile---+--1
		 |	    +--2
		 |	    +--3
		 |
		 +--friends-+--1
			    +--2
			    +--3

       The following commands build the ifile database in ~/.idata (use the -d option to specify a different location for the database):

	      ifile -h -i spam /spam/*
	      ifile -h -i ifile /ifile/*
	      ifile -h -i friends /friends/*

       The -h option strips off headers besides "Subject:", "From:" and "To:".	I find that -h improves ifile's performance, but you may find oth-
       erwise for your personal collection.

       Note that we have made the argument to -i the same as the corresponding folder name. This is not necessary. The argument to -i can  be  any
       word  you  want	to  use  to identify a category of e-mails. The argument to -i must not include space characters (including tab, feedline,
       etc.).

       At this point, your ~/.idata file should look something like this:

	      spam ifile friends
	      662 1020 6451
	      3 3 3
	      jrennie 9 0:3 1:18 2:16
	      mindspring 6 1:7 2:5
	      make 9 0:5 1:3
	      yahoo 9 0:1 1:22 2:2

       The first line is the space-separated list of folders. Their ordering specifies a numbering (spam=0, ifile=1, friends=2). The  second  line
       is  a  token count for each folder (e.g. 662 tokens observed in the three spam messages). The third line is an e-mail count for each folder
       (e.g. 3 e-mails for each of spam, ifile and friends). Each following line specifies statistics for a word. The format of a line is

	      word age folder:count [folder:count ...]

       where folder is the folder number determined by the first line ordering. Folders with a count of zero are not listed. So, the  line  begin-
       ning  with  "jrennie" indicates that "jrennie" appeared 3 times in "spam" e-mails, 18 times in "ifile" e-mails and 16 times in "friends" e-
       mails. The age is the number of e-mails that have been processed since the word was added to the database. Very infrequent words are pruned
       from the database to keep the database size down.

       Now that you have a database, you might want to filter some e-mails. Say you have the following incoming e-mails:

	      /--inbox--+--1
			+--2
			+--3

       To find out what folders ifile thinks these e-mails belong in, run

	      ifile -c -q /inbox/1
	      ifile -c -q /inbox/2
	      ifile -c -q /inbox/3

       Let's say that 1 is about ifile, 2 is spam and 3 is from a friend. Assuming ifile does its job correctly, you'll see output like this:

	      /inbox/1 ifile
	      /inbox/2 spam
	      /inbox/3 friends

       With such little training data, ifile is unlikely to get the labels correct, but you should get the idea :-)

       Now, if you move the e-mails to the folders suggested by ifile, you'll want to update the database accordingly. You can do this with the -i
       option, like before. Or, you can simply use -Q in place of -q above. This automatically adds the e-mail to the folder ifile suggests.

       Now, assume for a moment that e-mail 1 was actually spam. We've added 1 to ifile and put it in the ifile folder. We need to move it to  the
       spam folder and update the ifile database accordingly. We can update the database with the following command:

	      ifile -d ifile -i spam /inbox/1

       This deletes the e-mail from "ifile" and adds it to "spam".

SEE ALSO

       Examples of how to use ifile together with procmail(1) and metamail(1) can be found in the directory /usr/share/doc/ifile/examples.

ifile 1.3.4							   November 2004							  IFILE(1)