SpamNet: Razor for the Masses

UCRowerG writes "From CNET News on Yahoo!: "Conceived by Napster co-founder Jordan Ritter and open-source developer Vipul Ved Prakash, the company is touting the benefits of democracy, networking and collaboration in the war against unscrupulous e-mail marketers." " Since Prakesh is responsible for Razor, hopefully there will be Linux support as well, but once again I gotta throw my props at Spamassassin which catches over a hundred spam for me each day.

Comments

Here's the URL...

[EnglishTim]

http://www.cloudmark.com/

... because the guy who posted this obviously couldn't be bothered....

Re:Signatures?

[torpor]

Its way more complicated than that. Just read the "whats new" page for a good summary:

http://razor.sourceforge.net/docs/whatsnew.html

I'm frankly quite happy to see Razor come to fruition.

I had exactly the same idea for how to do this (with distributed signature databases) in '93 when I started a well known ISP. The plan was to offer spam-killing as a second-tier service to offer our customers, but alas: at the time, it was considered by management (read: VC) more profitable to allow open spam relays to our subscribers than it was to try to get subscribers to pay for a service like this, so the implementation details went nowhere.

Excellent to see it come to light in the form of working code, OSS style.

Spamassassin over Spambouncer

[waldoj]

I've run both Spamassassin and Spambouncer. For the curious, I prefer Spamassassin, and here's why.

I was very impressed with Spambouncer. It was the first spam-heuristic system that I'd used (previously, I'd relied solely on MAPS, ORBS, ORDB, RBL, etc.), and I was very impressed. I found that it rejected a lot of legitimate mail until I grepped my "Sent Items" folder, extracted every "To" field and made that my white list. (The assumption being that if I've e-mailed somebody, I don't mind hearing from them.) That worked very well, and I was happy with Spamassassin. The odd piece of spam would get through, and I still had 1:100 legitimate messages get put in my spam folder. But it made my life much simpler.

Then I tried Spamassassin. The big reason was because I wanted to take part in Razor and know that I was a part of a collaborative process. Also, Spambouncer hadn't been updated in months, which struck me as odd. But I also just wanted to try something different. I found that Spamassassin was better. Not in a way that made Spambouncer look bad, it was just clear that Spamassassin was a superior product. For example, Spamassassin provides a complete scoring in the headers, so you know exactly what criteria caused the message to be block. And I never had to set up a whitelist -- it just works. I still get that tiny little bit of spam that gets through, no more or less than with Spambouncer, but that's really not a complaint. It's very, very rare that a legitimate piece of mail gets caught up in the system. Best of all, the nonexistent addresses on my system that spammers have somehow discovered (big@waldo.net, aldo@waldo.net) can be forwarded via my aliases table to Spamassassin's (Or is it Razor's? I forget.) server to be automatically added to their honeypot collection.

I'll stick with Spamassassin, I think. It appears to be the most mature, stable, simple, straightforward spam filtering product available today. For those looking to set up server-side spam filtering, I highly recommend it.

-Waldo Jaquith

Have Your Cake and Eat It Too

[pjrc]

I've been using Razor with Spamassassin for many months. All you need to do it install the razor package (and the various perl modules it wants), and then add a line like this in your .spamassassin/user_prefs file:

score RAZOR_CHECK 5.0

I've also got the other "network tests" enables (blacklists), but I assign them low scores since they have a lot of false positives.

Using spamassassin with razor and the blacklists really works. My spam file has 836 spams automatically filtered between March 1 to today, June 19. Of those 836 messages, 511 have the RAZOR_CHECK string in the "X-Spam-Status" line that spamassassin adds to the header.

Not too bad, considering Razor uses a rigid message digest that fails if the spammer adds any "random" content to the messages. Saddly, it seems like that's becoming more common. Rumor has it that Razor is someday going to use "fuzzy" matches with one of two algorithms that somehow accomplish such a feat. Anyone know when/if this is supposed to happen??

Re:Hey Ximian!

[Azog]

Yes, it would be AWESOME if Evolution just had a checkbox in the mail preferences dialog where you could turn on SpamAssassin or other filtering programs.

However, I have SpamAssassin working with Evolution now. It was kind of a hassle to set up but it works... here's the overview:

- get and install SpamAssassin, test that it works by piping a good email and a spam email through it
- check that my fetchmail works, write a .fetchmailrc file
- check that my procmail works, write a .procmailrc file
- disable the regular pop mailboxes in Evolution
- add a new "local delivery" mailbox to Evolution
- wrote a tiny script I called "getmail" that does "fetchmail -m procmail" and make sure that it gets my email from the POP3 server correctly
- added the getmail to my crontab to run every 5 minutes
- added a filter rule to Evolution: if specific header X-Spam-Flag = YES, drop the email in my Spam folder

and that was it. :-/ No more spam! But you can see why having this integrated into Evolution would be nice.

- - - - my .fetchmailrc - - - -
poll mail.arnor.net
user "slashmail" password "secret" is user "thoffman" here
- - - - my .procmailrc - - - -
:0fw
| spamassassin -P
- - - - my "~/bin/getmail" script
#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/fetchmail -m /usr/bin/procmail >> ~/log/fetchmail
- - - - - my crontab - - - - -
*/5 * * * * /home/thoffman/bin/getmail
- - - - -