Developer Guidelines

How to Help

Spam Scalpel needs your help! Anyone with talent and spare time is more than welcome to join the development effort. You can help in all kinds of ways:

Architecture

Spam Scalpel is written primarily in Python. Data is stored in a MySQL database. The server component of Spam Scalpel exposes an XML-RPC interface. Many functions (such as submitting newly received spam) will be accomplished by small client programs utilizing the XML-RPC interface to talk to the server. The server handles reading from and writing to the database, and handles scheduling of forensic tasks.

License

Spam Scalpel is licensed under the GPL (v2).

Source Code

Spam Scalpel's source code is available for download from the Subversion repository hosted by SourceForge. Once there is an official release, more convenient downloadable packages will be created.

Patches

Please submit any patches to patches@spamscalpel.org. We'll do our best to get back to you as soon as possible.

Bugs

Please submit bugs to the SourceForge issue tracking system. Even better, send in a patch - if it works, we'll use it!

Database Structure

Database jockeys can get a sense of the database by viewing a SQL dump of it.

Mailing Lists

Python Programming

Ansel is testing out ActiveState's Komodo IDE and likes it so far. (You can get a free license of the Personal edition of Komodo by using a coupon code. Sweet!)

Resources