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

Plural

[richlb]

...which catches over a hundred spam for me each day.

Is the plural of "spam" really "spam"?

Link Ranking Wars

[Alien54]

I figure that there are so many spammers ....

what if they got into the system and overloaded it while still small so as to promote their own links and to discredit the project? Just a wild thought, not that they would ever be that organized.

I am thinking of the recent Google ranking wars, for example.

for most folks using it, it would be enough to put them off their feed if the spammers polluted the data pool early and strongly enough. Presuming that the average user was not an expert user.

I see this as part of a larger problem of people pushing competing viewpoints on the web.

Alledged nasty group "A" against alledged heroic group "B" - gets messy when things like politics and religion get involved.

SpamCop

[Mwongozi]

My e-mail is currently hosted at SpamCop, who do a pretty good job of filtering out spam before it even reaches my mailbox. They shunt spam into a seperate folder using the excellent SpamCop blacklist, and can also optionally use additional blacklists including SPEWS, Osirusoft, ORDB, Spamhaus, Monkeys.com, etc. etc.

Combine that with POP3, IMAP, and web access, and also the ability to suck mail out of existing POP3 accounts and I think it's excellent value.

No, they're not paying me to say all that, I'm just an extremely happy customer. :)

Hey Ximian!

[SLot]

This would be a welcome feature addition for Evolution.

Re:Spamassassin over Spambouncer

[rw2]

I'm a big fan also, in fact I introduced Taco to it. Folks interested in what the heuristics produce in terms of distribution of SA scores can view a graph of my logs. The three lines are the commonly used thresholds for deciding whether a mail is spam or not. Most folks run at 5, but some that are more paranoid about false positives run at 7 or 10. Myself, I find false positives to be practically non-existent and run happily at five. The missing data is just because I didn't keep statistics on non-spam mails until I had been running for a couple weeks.

Now for a commercial. Craig Hughes has formed a company to bring spamassassin to outlook users . And I'm setting up a hotmail like service at spamassassin.net to help users that don't have the time or ability to setup spamassassin themselves.

Re:I surrender!

[Captoo]

There is another option. If you get your email from a POP3 mail server (chances are that you do, unless you use web-based email), try the Spam Tamer Proxy.

1. It will let all the spam through, but it will eliminate pictures, pop-up windows, web bugs, and other garbage. That makes the spam easier on you and your bandwidth.
2. It will never block legitimate mail. Pictures sent as attachments make it through. (Friends and family send pictures as attachments, but spammers never do.)
3. It doesn't confuse people who send you legitmate email.

So, it's not the same as a spam blocker, but if conventional filtering isn't the right choice for you, I suggest you give it a try.

LART THE ISPs!

[wowbagger]

The single best thing all of us who know how to run traceroute and whois can do is LART THE ISPS THAT HOST SPAMMERS!

I've been forwarding every spam I get that come from a Verio hosted site, or spamvertises a site hosted on Verio to Verio and their parent company, NTT. I'm using bitch-list.net to do so, since they have a bazillion email addresses for Verio. I make sure the email has the spam attached, and since Verio has claimed the cannot read attachments (***cough***BULLSHIT****cough***) I also paste the mail headers into the message, along with a WHOIS and traceroute showing it to be a Verio customer. When they complain, I tell them "MY message isn't spam - your customer contacted me, so a prior business relationship exists. You want it stopped, stop the spammer."

I won't say it is working, but if 10% of everybody who got these spams did as I do, then Verio's help desks would be so clogged that they couldn't HELP but see the damage on the bottom line.