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Spamassassin Beats CRM-114 In Anti-Spam Shootout
Simon Lyall writes "A new study of antispam software shows that Spamassassin performed well in various configurations along with Spamprobe , Bogofilter and Spambayes also came out good while CRM-114
failed to live up to its previous claims . The study shows: 'The best-performing filters reduced the volume of incoming spam from about 150 messages per day to about 2 messages per day.'"
the mozilla spam filter does a very good job too, when it learns enough it becomes over 95% acurate. i dropped evolution for it , and never looked back
Putting a windows cd backwards, plays evil messages, but it gets worse, putting it right, installs windows.
The best-performing filters reduced the volume of incoming spam from about 150 messages per day to about 2 messages per day.
How many false positives though?
John Kerry is a Joke!
I wonder how Mozilla Messenger/Thunderbird's spam filtering stacks up against these filters? I've heard some negative comments about the Mozilla filtering system, but it's worked wonders for me.
- I only use my main email address with friends and family, and never post it online.
- Whenever I post an email address or register for anything online, I put thatsite@mydomain.com as my email address.
- All email is received by one account, but each message can have a different "to:" header. I set my filters to filter mail to different boxes. Email sent to amazon@mydomain.com goes to the amazon folder. Same with ebay, slashdot, whatever.
- Any time I start receiving spam, I just set my mail server to disregard email sent to whatever email address is getting the spam, and I can stop doing business with the company that sold my email address.
I receive on average 0 spams per day.Albuquerque PC
OSX's built in mail seems to be pretty close to the accuracy numbers listed in the above summary. I tend to have one to three pieces of spam slip through which are almost always entirely image based with some poetry or equivalent attached.
I must say I've been pleasantly surprised with the spam filtering it provides and it has been a lot easier than the hoops I used to utilize to clean out my inbox.
--- I do not moderate.
users. those silly, silly users. i was in charge of spam for my company for the greater part of a year. using an outdated KEYWORD based system > I was forced to read every.caught.message to look for false positives. ...
did you catch that? yeah...i had to go through EVERY 'spam' tagged e-mail that went through the company.
needless to say, after the first week i was ready to gouge my eyes out. but hey, at least i earned that 'i read your e-mail' sticker!
anyways, the point that i'm failing to make here is the cause of the spam...
the damn users.
whether it be responding to spam, putting their e-mail address in every single webform they encounter while surfing instead of working, signing up for spam voluntarily, or whatever the cause may be..
i ran some numbers on the logs, and came to an astounding find.
a few people were getting literally a thousand messages blocked, per month.
i, on the other hand, had maybe one or two a month.
and i'm not a nazi with my e-mail address....but i do take some care in what places i type it in.
an ounce of prevention goes a long way folks.
SpamAssassin used to be super-good for me, but recently it has become a nightmare... even with Bayes filters on and training it with about almost 2000 spam messages that have escaped it before, I STILL get an enourmous amount of spam every day... maybe I'm doing something wrong with the config, I admit that I haven't spent that much time on that, but it seems like it should be working better :-((.
Spam sucks. Everyone stop buying the products advertised and it'll be over. But then again, people will always be too dumb for an easy solution like that (reminds me of the gooback southpark...)
I haven't read everything in detail yet, but one of the things that stands out is that their 'gold standard' representing the best result consists of 9,038 ham messages (18.4%) 40,048 spams (81.6%). While large, the dataset is unbalanced. One of the things that is recommended by many of the filters is training on equal proportions of ham/spam in order to prevent biasing (overfitting).
Their train on errors approach may simulate what goes on with some filters it doesn't reflect the scenario where there is a initial dataset to be trained on _before_ new messages are processed. Instead, each message is in essence 'new'. So in their tests the machine learning filters start out knowing nothing, but SpamAssassin starts out with its inbuilt ruleset. Not exactly fair.
-Greg
I can certainly see how waiting on our government will decrease the number of messages transmitted through my mail servers daily.
It's reassuring to know that the "authorities" have effectively reduced the number of messages through my server by 10-14k per day......What great guys, those 'authorities', aren't they thoughtful and quick to respond. We've only been waiting for a spam-relief law for....10 years and they finally gave one to us. Oh wait....SpamAssassin is what reduced those messages.
The reason we don't wait for the gov to step in and take care of business is that THEY'VE DONE NOTHING SO FAR. You expect me to believe the government will solve my spam problems? I'm not holding my breath.
A combination of RBLs, DNSBLs, F-Prot, and SpamAssassin is what reduced the number of messages sent through my servers. I'm interested in results NOW, not legislation tomorrow.
"Lame" - Galaxar
Here's how you assuade false positives:
You keep one account for people who don't know you. You spam check that one. You put that on business cards, use it to sign up for porn sites, and post it on slashdot.
You keep another account for responding to email. You set that as your reply-to. You do not spam check it.
This way, there is a way to reach you for customers, clients and friends that will ALWAYS work. Call it the direct line. And, there's a way for people to introduce themselves to you. Call it the "front desk." Anyhow, with SpamAssassin (which includes a bayesian filter, btw, which can be autotrained to learn spam-like language from other mail it sets up), most of the bullshit calls will be correctly tagged and most of the incoming calls will get to you. I haven't had a false positive in months. But I train the thing like Rocky Balboa.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Yah, I ran this for about a year before I switched ISPs (and got a new, spam-free email account).
It was amazingly accurate, with about one mistake per thousand emails once I had it trained. I'll go back to it if I start to get a bunch of crap in my in-box. I remember reading that spammers would test their emails against the most popular anti-spam filters, but they still almost never got through Popfile.
I tried SpamAssassin as well, after I had some issues with PopFile (it would stop responding after a large volume of email), and it was more difficult to set up, and didn't have the nice configuration options of Popfile.
I'd like to second SpamSieve. If more than one piece of spam gets through in a day (where each day I receive > 500 pieces of email), I am truly surprised. My stats for June are:
Works for me. Oh, the false positive was a list that I just signed up for. They sent a confirmation mail, I checked to see if it was caught (it was), and marked it as "good". Piece of cake.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Some guy a few stories back mentioned he was getting 3000 ad impressions and 15 clicks a day or so with AdSense. Which is terrible. At first I assumed he was just oversaturating his visitors with ads. But his ad placement is also terrible. It's at the very bottom of the page where few are going to see it. But he is also over saturating. His pages are very busy with information and the ads are on every single page.
What happens when you constantly shove something in someone's face is that they learn to ignore it. Either consciously or subconsciously. In the case of advertising if someone is shown an ad and they aren't interested and another ad is shown there's a very good chance they won't even notice it. Even if they would have been interested in what it was offering. This is because they were annoyed by the first ad so they just mentally block any additional ads.
This is why the response rate to spam is so terrible. People for the most part just subconsciously ignore it. It's just noise.
Advertisers like radio stations because it tends to be a captive audience. People are very unlikely to turn the station when ads come on. However there is one local station that I've learned to turn the channel on when the ads start because I know I'm going to get to my destination before another song comes on. There are other stations that I don't change the channel on because I know it's just a short break.
Just like the guy pumping out 2985 ads that no one clicks on, spammers would benefit immensly by pulling a large chunk of the ads. People are more likely to notice when they aren't bombarded by ads and the response percentage goes up.
It seems counterintuitive that less advertising means a greater response but that's actually the case.
I normally notice the ad banners on Slashdot because that's pretty much all the advertising there is. I rarely ever notice the text ads. Even though they're placed on the left side in the best position as anyone who scrolls the page is probably going to see them. Slashdot's problem is that the ads blend in with the web-site's color scheme too well so they're pretty much invisible to anyone with a scroll wheel.
On GameDev the site is so littered with advertising that I never notice it anymore. By the time I close the stupid popup ads that circumvent Google's pop up blocker using evil little tricks I'm too annoyed to even look at the other ads.
Web-sites get desperate and think more ads == more money. And the actual result is less valuable ad space because the click thru rate is so low and fewer clicks because users tune the ads out which results in less money than if they had focused on the click thru percentage rather than the number of impressions. If you have a web-site with a high click thru rate advertisers are more likely to pay more because they know that if they show an ad there's a very good chance they'll get a click thru.
But then I'm guess spammers have never taken a course in marketing or bothered to think about things from their potential customer's perspective.
Keeping ineffective ads visible hurts the effectiveness of the better ads. Spammers are in effect destroying themselves in that area. As are ad happy web-sites.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
I've been using DSPAM for nearly a year now, and it's just kept on getting better. I can't imagine life without it now.
I have 17 DNS-based blacklists in front of it, because I would rather block the messages at the network interface than filter them with my own resources, but those that slip through don't stand much of a chance of reaching my inbox. I have had my current email address out there on the web and in Usenet for six years, so I see a lot of junk -- DSPAM stops all but one or two per month. SpamAssassin can't even come close to that.
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