Seven Spam Filters Compared

Goo.cc writes "Those wondering how their spam filtering software performs in comparison to other's may want to read this article on Freshmeat, where Sam Holden performs comparative testing of various popular e-mail filters. The filters tested includes Bayesian Mail Filter, Bogofilter, dbacl, Quick Spam Filter, SpamAssassin, SpamProbe, and SPASTIC."

Comments

My own spam solution....

[Kane Skalter]

I usually don't accept any email from people I don't know, so I simply set up my filter with a whitelist. That means that I filter it out if either of the following conditions are not true:

• Contains my initials. I simply ask my friends to insert my initials in the subject line. They're all happy to comply.
• If I opt-in to something, like /. updates, I allow *that* domain (*@slashdot.org, for example). No third party co-brands are accepted.

Fair enough?

So weird

[brokencomputer]

I find it funny that so many people have problems with spam. I have never gotten a spam message with my current email address. Don't spend time trying to filter-- get an obscure email adress like saf4502@E8Hkl3.biz

Thank you from a Spammer

[Anonymous Spammer]

As a professional sender of spam, I just want to tell you slashdotters to keep on playing with your spam filters. As long as you use spam filters on your e-mail, I can continue to reach my real intended targets, those non-slashdotters who do not know better and will buy my products or click through to my client's websites. Your filters really help cut down on the complaints to the Internet service providers I do business with, and as long as not too many complaints come in their marketing people assure me we can do business. Of course, I still waste your bandwidth and mailbox capacity, but you no longer complain to uce@ftc.gov, my access providers, or anyone else who might cause me problems. My yahoo and hotmail and other accounts for replies are lasting much longer before getting shut down because someone complained to these service providers. And my clients are even reporting that they can start mailing out 800 numbers like 1-800-901-3719 again and they will not have you damn geeks set up their modems to keep autodialing them, since you spend your own time and effort to filter the e-mail and only clueless users who might actually call see the numbers.

Please don't bother your Congressmen or Senators proposing legislation that might not work 100%. Just keep on filtering the spam I send you, I know you would have never bought from me anyway. That you can filter legitimizes my business and my waste of your bandwidth.

P.S. To be sure of not getting a false positive , be sure to send all filtered mail to a special folder. Waste your storage space storing the mail until you manually go through every piece to be sure you didn't accidentally filter something important. Of course, this will take exactly as much effort as it would have to just check the e-mail when it first came in, not to mention the extra effort spent in setting up the filters and the extra space for storing your incoming spam folder, but what the heck. If you think that you can scan e-mail for false positives faster this way you are just fooling yourselves, if you are scanning faster e-mail that you expect to be all spam, you will miss the very false positives that you think you are looking for. You geeks enjoy wasting time this way, and I certainly appreciate it. It makes the work of all us spammers much easier.

Think you've seen this before? Don't complain. Just go through lots more work to set up special filers on your computer so that you will not see it again. You should have to do that. It's the true geek solution, and I would really like it if you did.