DSPAM v3.2 Released

Nuclear Elephant writes "After four months of development DSPAM v3.2 has been released, bringing many new enhancements and filtering technologies. These include distributed computing support, implementation of Bill Yerazunis' Sparse Binary Polynomial Hashing algorithm (from CRM114), and v1.2 of Bayesian Noise Reduction. Other enhancements include SQLite support and many significant performance enhancements for PostgreSQL. DSPAM's official release is next week, but you can download the preview release now. Users of the project have also contributed towards creating a new logo for this release."

Comments

What about false positives.

[Anonymous Coward]

From TFA, "around 99.95% (1 error in 2000)"

I'm sick of spam filters braging about their overall error rate. All of them do OK at getting rid of the bulk of spams and saving the bulk of time.

The real important differentating factor is how many false positives they mistakenly accuse of being spam.

The consequenses of a spam message getting through are minimal - under a seconds of time, on average, to skip them.

The consequenses of a non-spam getting blocked can be huge - loss of a customer - a mom not knowing her kid is in trouble.

I wish the spam filters focused entirely on reporting how few false positives they produce.

Re:What about false positives.

[BasilBrush]

Why isn't that relative in tyour address book? / Why don't you have whitelisting set up?

Re:What about false positives.

[BasilBrush]

With a 99.9% accuracy on spam filters, and better performance on false positives, it just isn't worth the time. On the occasional chance that you are sent something from an address that isn't in your address book, and also happens to be a false positive, the chance of it also being vitally important are slim. And if it is vitally important, the sender will in all probability chase you when you don't respond.

There's a story about a CEO that used to sweep his pile of memos into the waste bin every morning. The theory being that 99% of them were about things that were irrelevant, and for the 1% of important stuff, people would chase him. I can't remember whoich CEO it was supposed to be though, and it's probably apocryphal. But it does hint at a truth. People who manually go through any amount of spam manually to search for false positives are probably being too anally retentive. Life is too short.

Re:DSpam with qmail / vpopmail

[Anonymous Coward]

Administrators really shoudn't configure their systems to return mail that contains virusses. Most of these are sent from spoofed addresses anyway and don't make it to the system that is actually infected. They just annoy people that are not responsible for the original messaga. And on top it just generates an unnecessary amount of traffic and I really just consider this to be spam.

A little Harsh!

[andyfaeglasgow]

Didn't your mother tell you that if you haven't anything nice to say, then don't say it all!

Re:None of the above

[iBod]

Well that may work for you but it doesn't work for businesses. Change your name every 6-9 months? I don't think so.

Informative, yes...

[warrax_666]

but somewhat besides the point.

I have to disagree with you on whether it's spam, however. Just making up statistics here, but I'd guesstimate that the sender address of >99,99% (probably even more) of all virus emails is forged and probably points at an innocent third part. That means that the message from the virus scanner is completely and utterly worthless to the reciptient (i.e. the "sender" of the virus email). That makes it "junk" or "spam" in my book.

You're right that there isn't much you can do, but I usually check to see if the mailer-daemon/postmaster address in the message looks legit and send off a boilerplate message saying something to the effect of "what you're doing is stupid and counterproductive, please stop".

Hopefully SPF can stop some of this sender spoofing.