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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."
Are most people using a bayesian DSPAM, CRM114, or SpamBayes along with SpamAssassin (rule based)? Or do you just use the bayesian filter?
I see that most of these bayesian filtering programs mention that they can be used with SpamAssassin. Is it usually best to run both for DoublePlusGood(TM) spam catching?
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I am using D-Spam on a qmail/vpopmail server and I find that its great in terms of accuracy. Most of my users have never had a false positive and many havent seen a spam after a couple of weeks of training.
The problem that I have with DSpam is the integration side. Im not sure how it goes with other mail systems but integrating it with vpopmail was a major pain. It seems easy, you just put the command in the dotfiles, but in practice getting it to work was quite a trial. Even now it doesnt integrate properly with the web administration, etc despite some scripting and minor code changes.
Because of this Ive been thinking of switching to Spam Assassin simply because of its integration with qmail-scanner. Has anyone else had similar problems or been in a similar situation and found a good solution?
a few months ago those features were available, too. while dspam is great at filtering mail, I faced two crucial problems, which forced me back to spamassassin. I haven't heard that they fixed any of those: .. 10, so I can check 0..4 where 0 is ok (few false negatives) and 1..4 spam (few false positives), and I can directly delete thousands of mails in 5..10 without looking at them.
- the database did grow huge. when my single user server with 128 mb had to use a 512 mb spam token database, performance was terrible. even with the tools included I could not do anything to fix the issue.
- dspam knows only yes or now, there is no usable value that gives you some grey information. as a result, I had to check all those spam postings for false positives. Spamassassin on the other hand has that spam result 0
i wont go back to dspam unless someone can offer speciic help for those issues. I believe everyone will face them sooner or later.
The DSPAM site mentioned that it can be compiled on Mac OSX, but what about Winblows? I only have one box (go ahead and laugh) and it is an older Pentium III Winblows machine. I'd like to have a seperate box to act as a mail server but it just isn't currently feasable (translation: I'm broke.) Is there any way they can compile DSPAM for Win9X?
even false positives are not important. if I get 1000 spams a day, but only 40 legal mails, then marking everything as spam is 96% correct. if 35 of my mails are easily identified as legal mail (a procmail rule could do - closed and filtered mailing list) then marking those as good and everything else as bad is 99.5% correct. note that still all 5 personal mails I would get are marked as spamm.
the big question for me is: how many mails do I need to check for false detection? and here is the dspam issue: it doesn't give you a grey marking, so you either check on of the mails marked as spam, and could possibly loose many important mails, or you need to check all of the spam messages, which loweres the advantage of a spam filter.
i get a huge volume of spam, a some ML and a few other postings. If i get one word document from some windows using relative every few weeks, it still must not be marked as spam. with dspam i had to check the mails marked as spam to find such false positives. because i had to check all spam mails, dspam was useless. with spam assassin i only check level 1..5 and can ignore thousands of mails in spam leven 5..10 which gives me a very good middle way between a very unlikely case of overlooking a false positive and thus loosing a mail (hasn't happened as far a i know) and looking only a few spam mails for false positives.
No. Since spammers mostly use fake addresses, it's pretty pointless trying to send mail back to them. All that would achieve would be that you would receive all the bounces back and you'd get double the junk mail.
Here's another spam solution:
If we had a respected national leader who could often talk to millions of people, that person could change the culture. The leader could tell everyone never to buy anything or even respond to unsolicited email advertising.
It might take years, but eventually it would not be economic for spammers to operate, particularly since spam filters would continue to improve.
The only person who could do this in the U.S. now would be Oprah Winfrey. She has an enormous following, and has a reputation for positive thinking (and, unfortunately, sometimes being ignorantly anti-male). She could tell her women viewers, and ask them to tell everyone in their family.
If we had a positively-minded president, he or she would be in an excellent position to change the email culture. A president could change the culture in a few months, possibly. It would simply become socially unacceptable to respond to unsolicited email.
Unfortunately, we don't have such a president. For example, see this article: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government.
If the spam culture change worked, the next thing I would like to see is an open source reference browser that set standards for how browsers should work. Unforunately, Bill Gates is not a positive leader, either. I would like to see Mozilla become the U.S. national government standard. Anyone could continue to use any browser they wanted, but the government's power could be put behind web page rendering standards and browser quality.
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Government data shows Democrat and Republican spending patterns.
... I want a spam filter that automatically forwards all spam to the abuse@ mailbox for the domain from the spammer.
Once the admins start getting hundreds of thousands of spam complaints in their abuse boxes PER DAY. Then maybe they'll start to think of ways to fix this problem.
Netblock blacklisting is a really poor solution.
/24 and then a /16 to be blocked.
It is the only solution when the ISP will do nothing to stop the spammer on their network.
In some cases a single spammer causes a
That is rather difficult without the ISP's assistance (or them repeatedly ignoring the complaints).
Btw, do you understand that changing ISP may not be an option?
Sometimes that is true. In which case, you should get on the phone and make sure that your ISP understands that they have customers who will be upset if the ISP doesn't handle its spammer problem.
Those lists, by themselves, do not block any email at all. Those lists are used by people who are fed up with trying to get ISP's to deal with their spammers.
Having users sort their mail and train a statistical filter from scratch is just way too much to ask - you'll get inundated with support calls and executives just don't have time to sort out the crud - they hired YOU to do it - passing the buck back to them ain't gonna fly...
The system should get rid of 99.9% of the crud by default, then let the users wholfeel like doing it, report the remaining 0.1% to a central mailbox where you can sort it and retrain the statistical filter if necessary.
Oh well, what the hell...