Slashdot Mirror
SpamAssassin 3.0 Released
davemabe writes "At long last, SpamAssassin 3.0.0 has been released. I've been using the release candidates for a month or so, and the results have been far improved over previous versions. Its use of SURBL along with Bayes auto learning make it seem like this solution is the one to beat. It looks like they've introduced a new logo as well. Snazzy!"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The real news here is not Bayes filtering or SURBL, but the totally rebuilt plug-in architecture of SA 3.0. Plug-ins for the 2.x version were quite a bit harder to write.
Version 3.0 will result in a proliferation of good third party plug-ins that are going to put SA into more direct competition with some of the commercial vendors out there.
I've been using RC1 for over a month now, and I'll tell you confidently that
-- Performance is MUCH better than it used to be. It scans messages much faster than I've ever seen SA 2.x do, and doesn't hog my server's resources anymore.
-- THIS THING ROCKS. For almost two weeks after I installed it I kept instinctively sending myself test emails to make sure I hadn't broken my mail system, because my volume of incoming mail had reduced so drastically. I was used to getting at least a new spam every 2 minutes. After installing SA 3.0 I got one false negative in a 72 hour period. It is *that* good. To date I still have not recorded a single false positive. I really had to convince myself that this thing was real.
This spamfilter rocks. I'd award it product of the year if I could.
Am I a hipster-doofus?
Didja notice the Apache feathers on the arrow in the new logo? Nice touch!
There was a good scientific test linked on slashdot a while ago, comparing spamfilters and including DSPAM and SpamAssassin.
Contrary to DSPAM author's claims, both it and and CRM-114 (another package which likes to self-hype) performed quite a bit worse than SpamAssassin.
Then again, I've heard people being happy with DSPAM that were not happy with SA.
Guess it depends on the mailfeed you get.
What I would like to know, how does SA scale? About a year ago a talked to my ISP about it and they said they could not use it as it did not scale well and could not handle big loads.
It would be nice if it could be implemented now as I personally receive about 1000 spam messages a week.
- In Memoriam: Jeroen de Bruin (1972-2004), bye bro
Artificial intelligence was born... Filtering spam.
In Greg Egan's _Permutation City_, spam filters and spam become ever more intelligent. Your spam filter runs the interactive video mail in a sandbox trying to detect whether it's spam, the spam tries to detect that it is in a sandbox or that it is talking to an AI construct, so that it can hide its commercial intent. Your filter tries to mimic you (and you review its reactions now and then, try to get its facial expressions ever more like yours, etc), the spammers try to get more information about you so they can try to fool your filter by making the spam look like on of your friends, etc.
This is an obvious arms race and in that book, AI and uploaded individuals etc exist - but the trick is to make your AI spam filters as good as possible without making them actually self-conscious, since using self-conscious AI software for spam filtering would be torture.
I rather liked that idea.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
I suppose this will driver spam-advertizers to obviscate their URLs in the spam mails. Eg use javaScript to build the URL so the real URL can't be detected -- like we do with our mail addresses on webpages so they won't be harvested by spammers!
One of the problems with using IPs is the massive amount of Virtual Hosting being used. Say I'm a 1&1 customer, and there are 400 other domains going to the same IP as one of my domains, and I send you an email with a link to something on my site, but one spammer has managed to get an account with 1&1 for now. If they're on the same box as me, you just blacklisted 399 other domains that shouldn't have been blacklisted.
And the muscular cyborg German dudes dance with sexy French Canadians