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DSPAM v3.0 RC1 Spam Filter Released
Nuclear Elephant writes "DSPAM v3.0 RC1 is now available for download, with a stable release scheduled for June 13. DSPAM has appeared on Slashdot and in Wired News in the past for its high levels of accurate spam filtering. v3.0 is the product of three solid months of work. Some of the highlights include a very sleek redesigned interface, PostgreSQL support, many mathematical enhancements, and support for many of Gary Robinson's algorithms (such as Chi-Square, Geometric Mean Test, and Robinson's technique for combining P-Values)."
I am using this filter and after some training it is very effective. Especially useful is the inoculation feature, which you can use to register a spam only address to spam sending sites so that it trains faster.
My heart is pure, but make no mistake, it's pure evil
I'm all for throwing technology at the problem, but I hope people still realise that having a complex (and effective) spam filter does not take away the millions of megabits of traffic wasted on UCE when it's in transit.
Look! We came out with this great filter so nobody else gets spam! This solves the problem of spam once and for all! Even though spam is still clogging our networks and wasting bandwidth, this filter will solve all of our problems.
With all the time spent on making spam filters, why don't we spend that time working out a new protocol for email transfers, one that would not be able to spoofed, or spend that time installing server side programs that put a small time delay between messages as well as bandwidth restrictions for all outgoing mail?
When you run your own mail server, or administrate a mail server for a large number of people, server-side anti-spam filters and countermeasures start making a lot more sense. Do the math on a company with 100 employees (at $25/hr) who check mail twice a day and spend 5 minutes each time hassling with anti-spam measures in client-side mail apps. In this scenario, a seamless anti-spam solution is worth conservatively $400 per day, or $100k/year not counting bandwidth savings. There are definitely cases when client-side filtering makes sense, but if you can handle it at the server, email-based business methods scale better.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
As far as I know, the main difference is DSPAM does not use weighted filter rules at all like SpamAssassin's hybrid approach does - DSPAM is designed to purely rely on analysis of spam's properties (Bayesian, etc).
The other cool thing about DPAM is that it is designed to let users add/modify their own spam database - every email DPAM processes is tagged with an identifier, and is logged in a server-side database. If a delivered email is in fact spam but wasn't tagged as such, the user can then forward the email to the designated spam-sorting address, and DSPAM will automatically update that user's spam corpus (eg, because it's tagged with an identifier, you don't have to worry about the user forwarding the full headers, as the server already has that info on file).
AFAIK you can't do that with SpamAssassin.