tons of spam

[David G. Miller]

"jdow" <jdow at earthlink.net> wrote:

> > If you run your own mail server, I've had good luck with dSpam.  It takes 
> > a little while to get it trained since it's Bayesian filter based but I 
> > now get overall accuracy of over 95% and the spam identification is over 
> > 93%.  I should add that I get *very few* false positives (currently 12 out 
> > of over 15,000 e-mails) and several of those were right after installation 
> > when the filter had very little data to go on.
>   
>
> Wow - at THAT level it'd get chucked with extreme prejudice. (Since it
> is not actively evil I'd not give in the paraffin and lead foil wraps
> followed by a staking and burial at midnight of a full Moon. But I would
> put it on a disk and bury the disk.) That accuracy is horrible. If I cut
> my spam catch percentage to about 99% or so I could virtually eliminate
> my false alarm rate. But that's not worth the effort tuning the system.
> It ain't broke so I am not going to fix it. I'm serious that when I had
> the 250-300 spam a day spam traffic I'd go one to two weeks without a
> false alarm, once I found some juju to handle technical mailing lists
> that have patch files cross the list frequently.
>
> SpamAssassin can be awkward to setup. But once setup it is devastatingly
> effective, especially since it scores block lists. No one block list
> will give you a false positive. But they do save a lot of spam sneak-
> throughs. I'm quite convinced that a proper anti-spam tool combines
> rules and Bayes.
>
> {^_^} 
My guess is that the dSpam developers error on the side of fewer false 
positives.  The above results are with the sensitivity set as high as it 
goes.  dSpam is really designed to be forgiving to users like my wife.  
She checks her quarantine about once every few weeks and then usually 
just zaps everything that's in there.  Her approach only works well if 
there are very few false positives.  It also allows me to have a 
server-side spam filter instead of trying to set up some separate 
product for her Windoze box.

Cheers,
Dave

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Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.
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