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DSPAM v3.6 Released
Nuclear Elephant writes "After six months of development, DSPAM v3.6 has been released. The most notable change is the series of new features added to make an anti-spam gateway appliance possible (Knoppix anyone?). Version 3.6 also includes a highly accurate alternative to Bayesian filtering known as Markovian discrimination, based on Bill Yerazunis' research. Other significant enhancements include trusted sender whitelisting, integrated Clam Antivirus and LDAP support, a centralized spam training alias, and a new dependency-free storage driver. Much of the documentation has also been rewritten to make installation easier. A change log and release notes are also available. Slashdot has recently featured a review of the author's book, Ending Spam and an interview as well."
DSPAM is also noted for their trademark spat with Hormel, who tend to be nice about "spam" as a term until it's spelled in all-caps. (Previous Slashdot coverage.)
from the FAQ (http://dspam.nuclearelephant.com/faq.shtml#1.15)
Q. Does it work with Windows?
A. v3.2 is the first to include a Windows build supplement, which includes the necessary Visual C++ project files and portage to compile the agent and tools under Windows. Check out the win32/ directory in the source tree for more information. Win32 support is still unofficial, but seems to work well. Of course getting it compiled is one thing, getting it integrated is another. It's probably best to build it under Cygwin using the general distribution.
I'm a long-time proponent of and rare contributor to SpamAssassin, and I'll continue to be, but fighting spam is much like fighting disease: you have to diversify your defenses. DSPAM is a nice package, and is very well designed. I've spoken to the author in the past, and he has an excellent understanding of the complexities of the issue (as opposed to the legions of people who seem to think that spam filtering should be easy, given the right algorithm).
As far as I'm concerned there are two tools for spam filtering: DSPAM and SpamAssassin. Try them both. See what fits your needs. My impression is that SpamAssassin provides more knobs and buttons and is more easily extended by the casual user, but DSPAM can be lighter weight. Both are highly accurate, with very low false positive rates.
Although DSPAM is not an official participant at TREC, three configurations will be evaluated for comparison - with tum, toe, and teft training modes. Zdziarski reported some of the preliminary results in his interview, but complete and comparative results won't be available until TREC in November.
DSPAM, as it's running in my cluster, is using way more ram than the WRT54G physically has. Probably not a good idea to run it on that little box.
The OpenBSD port can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.00f.net/misc/port-dspam-3.6.0.tar.gz
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While it's great that it learns and makes decisions about the "spamminess" of various incoming items, the most reliable method I've found so far is Greylisting.
The moment I installed and started GLD (gasmi.net), the spam simply stopped. It was like flipping the "nospam" switch on. The spam just stopped. No false positives, no missed spam, nothing.
Every now and then I get unwanted email, but at least now it's from an actual, identifiable SMTP server, not a spam-bot.
It's an amazing improvement from implementing a really elegant concept.
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