$Id: README,v 1.12 2002/08/11 10:39:17 bu Exp $

Microbrew MicroSieve
Version 0.7.0 Beta

USENET SPAM filter

http://www.microbrew.org/products/usieve/

by Bulent Yilmaz


LICENSING
=========

MicroSieve is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

MicroSieve is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with MicroSieve; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 
59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307 USA


A full copy of the GNU General Public License can be found at:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt


This software is distributed with the libtre regular expression matching
library.  It is also distributed under the GNU General Public License.  For
more information regarding its licensing please check the 'libtre/LICENSE'
file.

DESCRIPTION
===========

Microbrew MicroSieve is designed to be a high speed spam filter for USENET
news.  After using some other filter programs written in perl, it was obvious 
that there needed to be a faster way to filter spam for today's 
high-bandwidth news systems (greater than 200GB/day), and thus MicroSieve 
was born.  Performance has been known to exceed 5000 articles per minute
on a Sun Ultra Enterprise 2 with one 300MHz prcessor.

This project evolved out of Jeremy Nixon's Cleanfeed project
(http://www.exit109.com/~jeremy/news/cleanfeed.html) and implements a
useful subset of it's functionality.  While using many of the rules that
Cleanfeed has, it shares no actual code with the project.


DOCUMENTATION
=============

README     - Contains relevant general information regarding MicroSieve.

INSTALL    - Contains instructions for installation and integration
             into capable news servers.

ChangeLog  - List of changes from previous version(s).

BUGS       - List of known bugs.


SUPPORT
=======

Additional support for MicroSieve can be found at the Microbrew support
site:  http://www.microbrew.org/support/usieve

Please post all requests for help and bug reports at that site. DO NOT 
email the author with support questions reguarding this software; they will
most likely go unanswered.


REPORTING BUGS
==============

To report a bug in the software please follow the following procedure:

1. If the program crashes unexpectedly while running, turn on article 
   logging by setting LOGLASTARTICLE to 1 in 'usieve.h' and reinstalling.
   This will log articles as they come in.  After the program has crashed 
   please send the article along with your bug report.

2. Go to http://www.microbrew.org/bugs/usieve and fill out a bug report for
   MicroSieve.


CONTRIBUTORS
============

Many thanks to all contributors and testers:

- Michael Heuss

   Contributed a binary search tree algorithm to add to the duplicate
   article checking.  The current incarnation of the duplicate article
   checking data structure is derived from and still contains some of code
   of the work he did.

- Mike Donovan 

   News administrator at Cidera.  Provided much feedback as to improve the
   behaviour of the program and the usefulness of the output.