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."

Comments

The real problem

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The real problem

[kramer]

I think the best answer the 'If nobody would by this stuff...' argument was:

Spam works on the level of 1 in 10,000. The general population contains a far higher rate of mental illness, senility, and retardation.

You'll never cure spam by 'education' of any sort. There are some people who are just too crazy or too stupid to learn.

Re:The real problem

[Anonymous Coward]

All these suggestions make the naive assumption that people in general learn from past mistakes.

I still prefer tougher email security

[NanoGator]

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.

Now, if there was an adaptation for Kmail

[grmoc]

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..)

Re:Filter at sender?

[Rick the Red]

What about the ISPs who cater to spammers? AOL and MSN are not the only ISPs, you know.

Re:Umm... what's the definition of spam?

[Rick the Red]

You miss the point. You teach dspam what you do and don't want to see, so ultimately you decide.

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).

Magic Bullet Idiots

[SuperBanana]

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.

Impossible.

[SiMac]

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.

Put this into Slashcode? heh

[dsanfte]

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.

Explained in the last DSPAM /. story

[devphil]

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.

Daft, on many levels

[Julian Morrison]

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.

The trouble with per-user filtering

[Animats]

Spam filtering needs to be applied to multiple E-mail accounts to work really well. The fundamental characteristic of spam that can't be avoided is that large numbers of similar messages are sent to different people. That's recognizable.

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.

Your spam solution could be abused

[Quantum Jim]

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!