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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."
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?
I would have thought that running 2 bayesian filters would cause more trouble than good. The first filter would be ok as it would be trained like usual.
The second filter would probably have problems because it would only see a small subset of all your mail as the first filter would have removed most of the spam. The second filter's sample would therefore be skewed and it would have far less data to accurately classify spam.
Just my thoughts on the subject anyway...
Here's what it shows.
ONLY the 3.2 Preview Release 1 is currently out!
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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.
Me've always found that the best filter still is the humble (and the not so humble) human :p
What I dislike is the centralized Antispam. What is spam for me could not be for you. I was using the antispam filter on thunderbird but at least in previous was not good then I switched to use K9 ( http://keir.net/k9.html ). Is there nothing around for Linux like K9 ? K.
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.
It's your server and hopefully you'll never have to suffer the 'collateral damage' of living near a spammer (network neighbourhood wise). It has happened to me a couple of times. The first time I actually spent time sending my reply from my gmail account, and told the guy about it. The second time I didn't even bother.
Netblock blacklisting is a really poor solution. In some cases a single spammer causes a /24 and then a /16 to be blocked. It doesn't make sense to me. OTOH, I discovered some time ago that blocking Windows boxes works wonderfully, and it's extremely easy to do with OpenBSD's pf :-)
Btw, do you understand that changing ISP may not be an option?
Does DSPAM inform the sender that his/her e-mail has been filtered out?
Why does DSPAM get front page treatment when the latest POPFile release (which now handles POP3, IMAP, SMTP and NNTP filtering) and has an XML-RPC external interface, supports different databases, etc. etc. gets rejected as a story?
/. has recently turned into some combination of Freshmeat and PC Magazine? Yes.
Perhaps it's because I don't tend to make super-wild claims about POPFile's accuracy? Or come up with cool marketing names for the internal technology?
POPFile's the only Bayesian filter that can:
1. Do more than spam vs. anti-spam and
2. Filter POP3, IMAP, SMTP and NNTP (that's right Usenet news)
Do I have an axe to grind with Jonathan and DSPAM? No, it's a cool project. Does it annoy me that
John.