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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."
I know I'm going to get mauled over this quesiton... but has anyone compiled it on Windows 2003 server ?
For practical reasons I don't have linux in my test lab, and I'd like to have DSpam on my Webserver which is running IIS6 and Windows 2003 Server.
I can see I need to run it in SMTP mode with a relay to my Exchange box, but I don't want to waste my time trying to compile it (using Visual Studio), if someone already knows it wont work.
-Jar.
Together, We Can Make Slashdot Better. I Do NOT Mod ACs. - Check Me Out
How about getting it compiled into a Linksys WRT54G router firmware i.e Sveasoft firmware?
> The best defense against spam is never to type your
> personal address anywhere on the internet.
Hiding your address does not work because some viruses collect addresses from your correspondents addressbook. Your address will percolate to spam lists, it is only a matter of time. If like me you have kept your adress for many years, you absolutely need some form of spam defense.
Below are some tests I ran with a pre-release version of DSPAM on a test corpus. As you can see, Markovian discrimination is significantly more efficient than any Bayesian methods and Chi-Square. Markovian showed slightly more (4 more than the top contender) false positives, but it also caught 100 more spam... some additional tuning, tweaking, and most importantly, training, can easily get this down to a very low error rate.
Bayesian (burton)
TP: 785 TN: 1003 FN: 218 FP: 4 SC: 4 IC: 0
SR: 78.27% IR: 99.60% OR: 88.96%
Chi-Square (multiword)
TP: 801 TN: 1005 FN: 202 FP: 2 SC: 0 IC: 0
SR: 79.86% IR: 99.80% OR: 89.85%
Chi-Square (single Word)
TP: 794 TN: 1003 FN: 209 FP: 4 SC: 2 IC: 0
SR: 79.16% IR: 99.60% OR: 89.40%
Bayesian (graham)
TP: 833 TN: 1002 FN: 171 FP: 4 SC: 4 IC: 0
SR: 82.97% IR: 99.60% OR: 91.29%
Bayesian (graham-burton)
TP: 838 TN: 1000 FN: 166 FP: 6 SC: 4 IC: 0
SR: 83.47% IR: 99.40% OR: 91.44%
Markovian discrimination (burton)
TP: 950 TN: 996 FN: 54 FP: 10 SC: 0 IC: 0
SR: 94.62% IR: 99.01% OR: 96.82%
... but it'll sound like one: I recently converted from a rather involved anti-spam defense utilizing SpamAssassin with Razor, Pyzor, and several RBL checks. I spent a fair amount of time selecting RBLs that worked the best and tweaking SA test scores whenever I got false positive/negative messages. I even had all sorts of validity checks turned on in the MTA to block out badly formed messages and the like.
I replaced all those defenses with: DSPAM. And I'm seeing better results out of the box than I ever did with a multi-layered SA-based solution, even after a lot of time tweaking.
A quick anecdote: When I converted, I opened up a bunch of previously blocked spamtrap addresses, just to get some good training material for the filter. I've long since passed my initial training threshhold but haven't even bothered to block the spamtraps again because I never see the spam. At the risk of sounding like I'm bragging, I literally don't have a spam problem anymore, and DSPAM is entirely responsible for that.
Now, I'm not necessarily advocating that you give up all your custom defenses and switch to DSPAM. (I've turned off all my other filters, but I haven't removed them completely.) There's always a chance that an ingenious spammer will find a weakness in DSPAM setups, but I can testify to the fact that DSPAM is "scary good" as of right now. Training the filter is a simple matter of dropping misclassified messages (and there aren't many) into an IMAP folder.
If what you have is working for you, stick with it. But if you're looking for a low-maintenance, high accuracy filter, you should definitely give DSPAM a shot.