SpamAssassin Gets a Promotion

darthcamaro writes "The folks at internetnews.com are reporting that the Spam Assassin project has been promoted to a full top level Apache Software Foundation project..the project has been in incubation for a while and it's finally made it through...the article also reveals that Apache is now using Spam Assassin themselves: 'I think spam filtering is now a critical part of the network infrastructure and Spam Assassin is a leader in the area,' said Daniel Quinlan, chairman of the Apache Spam Assassin Project Management Committee."

Comments

Great News!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is great news! I have been running SpamAssassin on my box for quite a while, just to filter my own mail. I recently installed it on my mother's Windows 98 box to filter her mail when she checks it with Outlook Express, and she hasn't complained about Spam since. With a bit of tweaking, its been catching 95% with no false positives. Hopefully the SpamAssassin project will keep on getting better :)

Re:Great News!

[NigritudeUltramarine]

A success rate of 95% really sucks when (like me) you get just over 2,500 spams a day. That'd still mean around 125 spams a day would be getting through. (I've had the same email address since the early 1990's, back when there was no reason to keep your email address "secret.")

Personally I do use SpamAssassin, but as an intermediate step.

First step: Check a whitelist of known senders. Deliver if the sender is on the list, AND the message originated from an IP subnet that I allow for them personally.

Second step: Scan with SpamAssassin. If the score is really high (above 20) throw it the hell out.

Third step: If the score is less than 20, and the person wasn't whitelisted, run the message through TMDA and politely tell the sender I'm not sure who they are, and I get a lot of spam, and could you please click this link to prove that you're a real person.

I've been using this three-step system for eighteen months now, and out of over one million messages that have come into my mailbox (really), exactly FOUR spam messages have made it all the way through. Apparently the spammers decided to go ahead and click on the little link, or they used a real person's return address, and when that person got they autoreply, they were too stupid to understand what was going on.

Even better, I have not received ANY indiciation that I've lost any messages; at least, no one has ever mentioned anything about an email that I didn't get.

I've got five other people at my domain using the same system, although for not quite as long (one for fifteen months, three for about a year, and one for just a month now); they have all had similar success.

So based on those numbers I'd estimate a success rate of 99.9997% for eliminating spam (which is, admittedly, COMPLETELY INSANE), and a false-positive (or at least "lost message") rate of 0% so far (fingers crossed). A few people have had to confirm their messages, of course, but I've whitelisted them as that happens.

I actually wrote all the connecting code in PHP, believe it or not, with a MySQL database as a backend. It's invoked using .qmail files. PHP is indeed good for things other than web pages; and was a little bit easier for me to maintain and deal with than Perl. The whole thing is less than 25KB of code. There is also a web backend which I use to configure it; that adds another 40KB.

The whole system took about twelve hours of programming to set up, on one Saturday.

Now, for correspondence to companies (such as Microsoft, or Amazon.com), I use a different scheme (although it's handled by the same PHP code). I create up a unique email address for each of them, which ONLY allows mail to or from that domain (for example "rptamazon@mydomain.com" only allows messages from amazon.com). Those addresses are also easily cancellable, individually, if the company starts to annoy me with spam. Basically, each email address can be assigned its own unique whitelist, and can be cancelled individually at any time, through the little web interface.

I also have a number of email addresses for things such as customer support for our company (I write computer software). I'm using the same system for those, also, but instead of checking whitelists based on the sender, I've found a simple way to do it is to check for ANY of our product names anywhere in the message body or subject. If the message doesn't mention any of them, it sends a simple autoreply back similar to that in (3) above, but mentioning that the message didn't seem to be about any of our products, but if it was, please click here, blah blah. We don't have a high volume of support messages (about one or two a day; we're a small company) but in the last year only three or four people have had to click through like that, and, honestly, their support requests were so f*cked up anyways that I'd rather it just dropped them on the floor. ;-)

Then, as a very last ste

DSpam

[Pinball Wizard]

After using SpamAssassin for quite a while, it just wasn't cutting it - 75%-80% accuracy is still a lot of spam to go through and delete. I added DSpam to my mail server and my spam catching rate is now better than 99%.

DSpam also came with much better directions for integrating with Exim than did SpamAssassin. As fond as I was of SpamAssassin, they have some catching up to do.

Re:DSpam

[Anonymous Coward]

DSpam 3.0 is definitely not easy to set up. Add to that there is a database that needs to be set up on the back-end, and lots of configure flags at compile-time, plus permissions issues, etc. etc.
It's also not very easy to understand how it works, or configure your mail client to easily train it, or to configure procmail how to properly call it (there are a lot of command-line flags as well).

That being said, IT IS WORTH IT. A properly set up and trained DSPAM filter will SOLVE your spam problem. Training time usually takes about 2 weeks and the results are fantastic after that.

You can also set it up a number of ways - server-side, user-side, with postfix or another mail server, with procmail or without. Relay or not. It's up to you.

If Only It Was For Real

[Nom du Keyboard]

If only it truly assassinated spamers.

what to do with spam after it's id'd?

[Hollins]

What do you do with mail SA has flagged?

I like SA, and find it is very good for identifying around 95% of my incoming spam. However, I also have around 0.1% false positive rate, which means at some point I have to look through all the filtered spam messages and make sure none of them were legit.

I need a better tool for handling mail SA has identified as spam, either server-side or client-side. I'd like to delete anything with a score > 15, simply store anything with a score > 5, and send an auto-reply for scores between 5 and 10 indicating that the message was marked as spam and I'll probably never look at it.

A good set of procmail and formail rules will accomplish this, but my hosting company has a weird procmail setup and I'd prefer something easier to implement.

Any ideas?

Re:what to do with spam after it's id'd?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sending an auto-reply on scores between 5 and 10 (or any other range) makes you part of the problem, not part of the solution.

I have a very well known address (which is why I'm posting as an Anonymous Coward :-) that receives many hundreds of messages every day. My mail server deals with about half of the spam I get. Well over half of the rest is autoreply responses from idiots who don't understand that *I* never sent that message in the first place -- the from address was forged by a virus.

The correct response to spam is to throw it away. Trying to reply to it makes the world worse, not better.

You people need to stop being so cynical

[Enlarge Your Penis]

I don't employ Spamassassin or any other spam blocker. As a result, I now have a penis that will make her scream, hot lesbian schoolgirls lusting after my every move, a wide range of generic drugs, 2 PhDs and a completely clean credit record

A step up from living in your parent's basement and whacking off to an inflatable doll, right?

I'd stay and chat, but I have to get back to a Nigerian man about a bank transfer

Get the owner, not the dog.....

[Univac_1004]

Spam Assassin, while a very clever program, is as misdirected as the "Canned Spam" legislation. It has no effect on the real economics of spam: who pays for it.

Somebody is paying for the spamming, and we know exactly who it is. The URL of that organization is prominently displayed in every item of spamail. It is the advertiser.

The advertiser is right there out in the open, easy to locate. If they're not, the spam isn't doing its job, and wouldn't have been sent. And easy to locate means easy to go after, easy to sue, to fine, DoS or whatever.

Dinging the advertisers, and dinging them hard, will instantly put the spammers out of business.

Spamming can be eliminated without blocking, white lists, or anti-spoofing RFC's. Just go to where it's pointing.

To draw an [ugly, graphic] picture: a dog comes and poops on sidewalk in front of my house, and I step in it. Yelling at the dog is going to be only moderately successful, building a poop filter is difficult, messy, and leaky (as Spam Assassin demonstrates) . Following the dog's leash and fining the owner is what works.

The owner doesn't bring the dog back since s/he doesn't want to pay another fine.

No owner, no dog, no spam.

Get the owner.

Kill the spam.

Re:Bout Time!

[Mazem]

Absolutely no false positives since I installed it a year ago ..

... that you know of.