Picture analysis

[Tony Johansson]

Hello,

I was thinking to myself why anyone would want to spend a fortune for a
service such as Messagelabs (and similar) when they could easily build (or
buy) a MailScanner solution.

The only real benefit, as I see it, would be their "Porn filter".  I could
be something very useful for schools, and quite possibly other organizations
aswell.  Up until recently there has been no open source initiative (that I
know of) in this field.

Now there is "Poesia", see http://sourceforge.net/projects/poesia/ or
http://www.poesia-filter.org

I'm no programmer and I see the project involves Java, something i know
MailScanner doesnt use at all.

Would it be a huge task to implement Poesias Pics- and Imagefilter into
MailScanner?


Another thing that struck me after reading a recent article,
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/4662
Isnt it possible that some organizations might worry about "stegged" content
in otherwise allowed files?
"Stegcheck" at http://www.outguess.org/detection.php doesnt strike me as too
hard (although I may be wrong...) to implement with MailScanner.
(I'm sure there are other tools for detecting stegged content in various
files, stegcheck would be a good start though)


I gather both these features would require quite a lot of processing power
and time but I'm sure some it would be acceptable for those who really need
these features.

Wouldnt a "Porn" and "Stego" feature in MailScanner be worth investigating?


regards, Tony