Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla Adding Spam Filters
ksheka writes "Mozilla mail now has Spam Filters, using Bayesian filtering method, no less. This is a very good thing, because it learns from the spam you receive, and constantly modifies itself, based on new spammer techniques!"
Bayesian technique is very good for the sort of abstract classification task that spam represents. It would be an interesting hack to try and train a network to categorize based solely on message body... i do however hope that their team has opted for practicality over just hack value and the network will also use such extremely relevant data as header information and comparing address versus address book(an e-mail from someone not in your address book is not necesarrily spam... but it is more likely to be).
lysergically yours
I assume the filtering statistics live on the client side. What about IMAP? If I open up Mozilla on a new machine, are all my spam statistics lost (presumably rendering the junk mail filtering statistics I've accumulated useless on the new machine).
It would be neat if, with IMAP accounts, Mozilla just stored the statistics in a file on IMAP server instead of on the client.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Well, most of my spam is already sent to /dev/null by the SpamAssassin ninja.
But, for those that make it past the email shadow warrior, I guess Bayesian filters are a double whammy they'll never survive... Mwahahahaha!
Kudos to the Mozilla programmers!
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
What happens when microsoft attempts to enforce this patent
what if in addition to this someone put together a company that the mozilla email client can report back to about what is labelled as span and the filters it created along with the headers of the message (or even the entire spam) and grab filters from others that recieves some spam that you have yet to recieve? it would be like a big distributed computing anti-spam project.. then if we were able to make the filters useable by sendmail to block at the server...
I'm almost thinking a distributed and automated anti-spam system like that could completely crush the spam problem within a 12 month period.
or I may be completely out of my mind.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I personally dont really care about all the junk emails I get. I dont get that many, and I can pretty much tell without looking at them. They go straight to /dev/null.
/var/ partition is only 200MB, 50mb free. And the maillog is growing at about 10mb a day. So now Im babysitting this server every day until the spam attempts stop. I dont think theres any way around it unless I get sendmail to check for open proxies. But I dont know how to do that, and I dont think they trust me enough to make such changes to sendmail.
Spam is such a horrible thing though. I work at a webhosting company. Im the one that has to track down the site with the old formmail.pl, removing 'aol.com' and 'yahoo.com' from the hosts to relay for, trying to find out who the hell added them so I can murder them. Im the one clearing out the mail queue with 100,000 mails. Im the one clearing the mail queues of people who thought it was a good idea to check the 'open relay' option in plesk. Im the one that has to deal with people bitching about how their mail isnt working or didnt get through.
Just the other day, I had a raq2 where someone had apparantly put yahoo.com and excite.com in the hosts to relay for. Yay! Thats what attracted the spammers. Now I get a request every second to send mail to 50 people at once. Now that I've removed them, none of them are getting through. But its a raq2, 133 mhz. It has to go through all 50 addresses and say 'relaying denied' and log it. It cant keep up! syslogd is taking up all the cpu and logging things from hours ago because its behind. Quickly, sendmail quits listening on port 25 (but the spam attempts keep coming somehow).
So I get the idea to block their ips, they seem to be using the same ips. But oh guess what, they're using open proxies and have about 400 ips. Well, I did this for about 5 hours, writing scripts to grab the repeated ips out of the maillog, adding them all to my sendmail access lists. Now every time they try to send mail, it blocks them instead of saying relaying denied 50 times for each request. But a minute later, I get a few new ips and it starts all over again. I have an access list about 6 pages long. Its doing ok, blocking about 90% of them, but every once in a while, they get a new ip and sendmail is brought to a stop.
Oh yeah, and my
So oh well, mail is getting lost every day on this server and its been renderred horribly slow for its users.. just because some moron noticed it would send some emails for him and started up his scripts.
Spam causes so many problems on the server level. Its what is making mail an unreliable service. I could care less about spam filters on my mail client. These are the things that make spam evil!
Software that only does mail filtering encourages spammers. The technically knowledgeable people don't get spam, so they stop worrying about it.
All mail filters should also use a service like SpamCop, so that the spammers lose their internet service accounts as the spam is filtered.
I send Spamcop all my spam. Spamcop analyzes it automatically and sends a message to the Internet Service Provider. I use the free Reporting only service.