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Paul Graham on Fighting Spam

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the near-and-dear-to-my-heart dept.

Ramakrishnan M writes "Paul Graham, the Lisp Guru is back with a great technique to fight spam. It is based on trust matric, and he claims, only 5 out of 1000 spams got leaked out of this system with 0 false positives. Worth looking at."

1 of 675 comments (clear)

  1. This is not news ... by dougmc · · Score: 5, Informative
    The statistical approach is not usually the first one people try when they write spam filters. Most hackers' first instinct is to try to write software that recognizes individual properties of spam.
    And he's correct. A few years ago, most spam filters did look for individual properties of spam.

    BUT, now, the best spam filters out there already use statistical properties. Spamassassin does this, for example, and it works *extremely* well. Before I found Spamassassin, I had a huge procmial recipe that used it's scoring mechanism to do basically the same thing -- but of course spamassassin does it better, so I switched :)