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."

Comments

Comparison to other tools

[Puramoca]

It would be interesting to compare this version to other spam filters and see how it measures.

Re:hiding your address

[Bogtha]

Though this is only possibly with PHP, ideally running on a Debian system, it's the most important language to learn in the universe.

What kind of fuckwittery is this? No, plenty of languages can code a simple contact form handler, the platform you run it on is pretty irrelevant, and PHP is by no means "the most important language to learn in the universe". It's a pretty typical scripting language, not the magic you make it out to be.

Re:Try DSPAM

[gvc]

If a user has to go into the SPAM box and double check that no mistakes have been made then the system is worse than not having any SPAM checking at all.

Not true. First, if the user's mailbox is cluttered with spam, the user is more likely to overlook good mail. More likely than a good spam filter. Second, it is way easier to scan a list of predominantly spam for occasional good mails (and vice versa) than to have everything jumbled together. Third, spam filters are good enough that one does not need normally to look through the quarantine list. Instead it can be searched if and when email goes missing. Almost all spam that is misclassified by a filter is weird in some way - cold call, internet transaction, advertising. Generally one of two mitigating circumstances holds: (1) there is a secondary social mechanism whereby the missing mail will be noticed and retrieved [e.g. nobody assumes that a cold call is delivered, and a reply to an internet transaction would be expected]; (2) the user doesn't really care about the email [e.g. advertising from their frequent flyer plan].

I've found greylisting to be the best solution so far

Greylisting "works" only because spammers aren't on to it yet. And it is intrusive - adding delay and risk of non-delivery. Greater risk, I posit, than the risk of using a spam filter.

Re:curious about MD

[Nuclear Elephant]

4FPs for 100-something more TPs? Heck yeah. At least for me.. But keep in mind these are just preliminary training numbers with 1000 messages in each corpus. After real-world training, any of these approaches will be much more accurate.