John Graham-Cumming
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John Graham-Cumming is a British programmer best known for the open source POPFile email filtering program, although he maintains a number of other open source and proprietary programs written primarily in Perl, C and C++.
He studied at Oxford University gaining a BA/MA in Mathematics and Computation and a DPhil in computer security [1]. Afterwards he worked for a number of start ups in the UK and US. He initially wrote protocol stacks in C and assembler at Madge Networks later moving to a California start up called Optimal Networks as Chief Architect. Optimal Networks was acquired by Compuware. While at Optimal he was named Internet Week's Geek of the Week in October 1997.
After Optimal he was appointed VP of Engineering at Scriptics (a California start up founded by Tcl language pioneer John Ousterhout). Scriptics changed named to Ajuba Solutions and was acquired by Interwoven where he was VP of Internet Technology. He left Interwoven to work for venture capital company Accel Partners, before founding Electric Cloud with John Ousterhout. He is currently Chief Scientist at Electric Cloud in Mountain View, CA. [2]
As the popularity of POPFile grew he became well known in anti-spam circles and was one of the founding speakers at the annual Spam Conference at MIT with Paul Graham and has continued to write and speak about anti-spam and email filtering. He maintains a complete list of his publications on his personal web site including his monthly column Ask Mr Make for CM Crossroads, and frequent articles for Virus Bulletin. He is an advisor to Mailchannels in Vancouver, Canada and a member of the Virus Bulletin advisory board. [3]
He also sells a commercial OEM anti-spam and email filtering library called polymail, which is licensed by a number of companies including Clearswift. The library is written entirely in C and provides very fast email classification and is sold through extravalent, LLC. [4]
In 2006, he was briefly banned from the popular web site Digg after posting a carefully constructed URL that defined recursion by linking a story on Digg to a story on the web site reddit and back again. [5] At the same time as being banned he won a Golden Reddit for most popular link of the day.[6]
In 2000 he started a web site called UseTheSource: The Reciprocal of Hype which was an early blog based on Slashcode and which featured a scrolling stock ticker with the 15 minutes delayed net worth of well known Internet boom CEOs (such as BZOS, CASE, CRLY, and CHMB). The site led to his first appearance on TechTV's The Screen Savers. He has written for many publications including The Guardian, Upside (magazine), Virus Bulletin, Dr Dobb's and Linux Magazine. He currently writes a monthly column for CM Crossroads called Ask Mr Make [7] and publishes a twice monthly newsletter on spam and anti-spam topics.
He maintains a regularly updated list of tricks used by spammers attempting to bypass spam filters known as The Spammers' Compendium. [8]
He is listed as an inventor on three US patents: 6,182,146, 6,584,501 and 7,086,063, and is the winner of a Blue Peter badge.
