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DSPAM v2.10 Released
Nuclear Elephant writes "DSPAM v2.10 is finally available, after four months of development. This is the first stable release to include Bayesian Noise Reduction which was recently mentioned on Slashdot and in Wired News as an algorithm providing accuracy levels as high as 10x that of a human. Some other new features include Neural Networking - which finds nodes in a network that are contextually similar to form a decision matrix, Global Filtering - which provides SpamAssassin-like out-of-the-box type filtering for new users until they build up their own wordlist, Automatic Whitelisting - which automatically learns who your trusted senders are, and many other optimizations and enhancements. Head on over and download the latest tar ball."
The real problem is people who actually buy this stuff. If no one was buying things from spam, no one would send spam. We all know this.
I propose we start spamming. Anyone who responds gets a nice l'il pistol whipping and is returned to their comptuer. After the first news report, people will be afraid to respond to spam.
This may work for a little while, but the creative peeps will find a way around it.
I say forget the filtering shit and force email to evolve. Part of the reason that spam happens is that there is no real authentication going on. No requesting permission to be on your white list. No real strong way to block anybody you don't want to hear from. No real way to verify the sender is legit. etc.
I don't claim to have all the answers, but I do know that I've been using ICQ for years and haven't seen a Spam from there since I turned on the 'require authorization' feature.
"Derp de derp."
That would be ideal.
(since then the 'casual' user could benefit from using it, without undue difficulty in configuration of mail delivery programs, which are notorious in general..)
it could be used in html rendering
What about the ISPs who cater to spammers? AOL and MSN are not the only ISPs, you know.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Outlook is like what you fear; Microsoft decides what you will and won't see. I can add specific senders to the black and white lists (you click to add to the blacklist, but you have to type in an address to add it to the whitelist -- stupid MS shits), but Microsoft decides if I can see that attachment (if they think it's bad, it's gone and I can't recover it) or if this email's spam (it regularly discarded stuff from IBM Developer Works until I added them to my whitelist). With a tool like dspam I can regain control over what gets filtered (although I've found no way to turn off Outlook's attachment blocking).
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Then the spam wouldn't even be transported over the net, saving vast amounts of traffic on the internet backbones. This action could also potentially kill spam overnight.
Ever read the FAQs for the anti-spam listsnewsgroups? Virtually top of the list is "I have some magic bullet solution that'll end spam tomorrow!"
You are -truly- naive to think this kind of solution would even be possible to implement; there are literally dozens of reasons why this would be a horrifically stupid idea; how this post ever got to +5 is way beyond me. Time to start meta-moderating more, as apparently positive mod points are getting handed out a little too easily these days.
Please help metamoderate.
If this happened, there would have to be about 10 SMTP servers handling all the mail, the ones belonging to the major backbone providers. Otherwise, a spammer could purchase a T1 from a backbone provider and send out as much spam as he wanted. Almost all ISPs catering to end users have to get their connections from other ISPs somewhere along the line.
It might be sort of difficult to have 10 companies handle the Internet's email supply.
By the looks of the Intel story below, Slashdot sure needs a good Bayesian spam filter. I recommend this. Or a baseball bat. Because you can go over to anti-slash and really pound some skulls with a baseball bat, and it would probably be more satisfying. But filters are good too, don't get me wrong.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
except that my article history is truncated in a futile attempt to get me to subscribe. So I can't point to the writeup I did.
The increased accuracy comes from the emails that will slip under your mental radar. You are a human, and you make mistakes. You wouldn't deliberately choose to read the email, but one day the subject line looks plausible, and so you bring it up. Three-quarters of a second later, you're glaring at the monitor and hitting "delete", but DSPAM wouldn't have let that slip by in the first place.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Everyone would fudge refusals and pocket the cash.
Scumbags would use billions of zombied PCs to send themselves mails, aggregate and pocket the cash. Or to spam you gratis.
There are transaction costs for generating, checking, and accumulating digital cash. Your paypal bills would be huge.
Everybody hates micropayments.
It's a dumb idea and it simply isn't gonna happen.
Looking for spam by content analysis for a single user only works for some people. If, for example, your legitimate E-mail contains many messages about investments, mortgages, and similar financial subjects, it's going to be hard to separate out financial spam by word analysis.
Spamcop does multiple-user analysis. It works better than most of the single-user systems.
What about the vast majority of e-mail users who have Outlook [Express] on Windows. When will a plugin be designed and ported which will work with these clients?
-- paper
There are several scenarios where your proposal would be bad for the Internet. Say I want to put my competitor out of business, or at least raise his costs. I simply use a bot to sign up for a couple hundred thousand email addresses, sign up for his newsletters, then ask for all those 1 cents back. The financial powers that be might also foresee too much liability and risk in ventures that depend on email (since it is, as you say, gambling). Thus the end of any free service that depends on e-mail for verifying accounts including newsletters, bulletin boards, online banking, and online auctions among others.
Furthermore, you'd have to have a foolproof system to pay for those cents. Fraud could be much more rampant: If you pay via credit card, the other guy (or gal) has your number and could overcharge a corporation by a twenty or so dollars. Furthermore, micropayments aren't economical unless many many many people pay. If most people play by the rules, then the costs of credit companies or banks or other institutions would either put most of these services out-of-business or into subscription only domains. Not to mention some companies might have "you agree not to ask for those cents" in addition to "I can send you spam" legal clauses - negating your proposal!
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
So, let me get this straight - my spam filter will know better than I do which emails I want to read, and which ones I don't?
:-(
Yes, it will. When I'm faced with 100 new messages in my inbox and probably only one or two are legitimate, I often delete messages that look like spam without opening them, and other times, I have to open them just to double check that it really is spam. I have accidentally deleted more than one legitimate message this way, and have wasted more time that I care to contemplate opening up spam.
So I probably have an accuracy rate of around 97 or 98%, which is nowhere near as good as 99.9.
(And I use SpamAssassin as well; but it's clearly no longer the killer it once was
As a further note. The best technology is to use spaminator.com. When you encounter a website that askes for you email address why give it one to send spam too that you have to clean up or leave to rot. Try this..... whateverthehellnameyouwant@spaminator.com.
Dumps the email data and address data base every 5 hours. Fun stuff.
Sparkeyjames
In this case, I have one. One e-mail box to handle a multitude of addresses. Yes, just one. All coming into Outlook Express believe it or not. Perhaps you misunderstood the premise of my post. I don't get SPAM; I simply don't receive it on a regular basis. I am very careful about where I give my e-mail addresses out. Since I tend to use a different address for each service, if I ever receive unsolicited mail, I simply delete the problem address from my list, and the problem is gone. No filtering. No chance of missing an important message from someone I know by accidental deletion.
The post above is mine, my login must have been dropped.
Fantastic.... Really I would live to try it.
:-)
I'm assuming you are linked to the project, forgive me for the rant if thats incorrect.
Might I suggest you get a webserver/ISP that is somewhat reliable. I've been trying to get a copy of this software since it was alst mentioned on Slashdot. The site was slashdotted when I first tried, cool I thought, I'll check again tomorrow. Still down the next day, OK I think maybe there's still an effect. I wait a week and check again thinking maybe they went over their cap from their ISP and they shut them down, but the site was still down and stayed that way for weeks.
I finally get back to it today and the site was up, great I think, so I try to download the latest version (before this story hit v2.08 if I remember), and the file wasn't there, although it was probably getting 2.10 copied up and linked. Then when I hit Slashdot I see this and of course the site is now down again (imagine my surprise).
How long will anyone that actually wants a copy of this have to wait? Could you not actually host a copy on your sourceforge site too so that people who want to use this could actually get a copy to install?
On a slightly related note when I was there I noticed they are looking for someone to write some installation scripts to add installation with various MTA's, again kind of hard to do if no one can actually get a copy. OK I'm finished
Normal people worry me!
The filter was tested on 6597 messages. So how many messages was it trained on? I sure hope it's not the same 6597 messages, because in that case any accuracy number is meaningless.
/A
Now if they could only make it usable. After reading the last Slashdot article about it I decided to try and move my Amavis/ClamAV/SpamAssassin/Postfix/Courier-IMAP setup to use DSPAM. Good Lord what a configuration nightmare. I couldn't find a decent HOW-TO and no real working example configurations in order to test it out. Sure the README "has all the information I'll ever need" but some of the stuff that it talks about I don't understand and I don't have the patience to configure it through trial and error.
Developing good software is one thing. But it's a lot nicer when good software is actually usable. I'll be sticking with SpamAssassin until they can dumb it down a little.