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DSPAM v3.2 Released

Posted by michael on from the kills-spam-dead dept.

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."

3 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. Re:second post? by hayds · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

  2. What about false positives. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

  3. Re:second post? by flynn_nrg · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?