Comparison of Bayesian POP3 Spam Filters

kreide writes "Spam e-mail has become an ever increasing problem, and these days it is next to impossible to use e-mail without receiving it in large amounts. Although various techniques exits to combat the problem, spammers seemed to be winning the war - until a new, powerful weapon appeared on the scene: Bayesian filters, our last, best hope for spam-free inboxes. In this review I compare POP3 based bayesian spam filters." We did an Ask Slashdot on this a few weeks ago.

Comments

Spamprobe

[1029]

The article didn't mention SpamProbe. It is what I use, and it has worked quite well for the past month or so that I've been using it. Perhaps this is just because the author didn't test this spam filter yet, but I like it quite a lot with my current mutt/procmail setup. Take this for what it's worth.

Re:"Bayesian"

[file-exists-p]

As far as I know, many of those filters are based on a decision rule of the form

P(mail is spam | words X, Y, Z, ... are in it) > 1-epsilon

The computation is then done using Bayse's rule (P(A|B)=P(B|A)*P(A)/P(B)) under certain independance assumption which makes it tractable.

So this is actually bayesian filtering ...

My favorite filter is spamoracle

It's virtually impossible to not get spam?

[setien]

No it's not.
I get spam at the rate of 1 spam mail per 6 months or so. Or maybe even less. I can't remember getting a single spam email on my actual email address for about a year.

If you have an account on a crapless domain (i.e. not hotmail.com, msn.com, aol.com and the likes),
it all comes down to this very simple rule:
Do not, under any circumstance, have your email address posted publicly accessible ANYWHERE on the web.
It WILL get trawled. And then it will be spammed relentlessly.

If you have an existing address you don't want to give up, or an address at hotmail.com or a similar place, dump it.
Then exercise a bit of common sense about where you use your actual address.

I have a domain which catches email to unknown addresses and put them in my regular mailbox.
Whenever I have to give an email address to some place on the web, I use *domain-i-am-currently-visiting*@mydomain.com. So if I am visiting foobar.com, I would put in foorbar.com@mydomain.com.
I have been doing this for years. It enables me to see what was the source of the leak when I get spam on one of the addresses.
It has taught me one thing: I have never, ever, ever, in all my years of online shopping, forum posting etc, come across a single website that have ignored their own privacy statement. Ever. Even the slightly sketchy sites (like divx subtitle sites) don't leak addresses.
I was surprised to realize this.

The only addresses I ever get spam on are the ones I know to be publicly displayed on the web.

So it's that easy to avoid spam.