Proving Which Spam Filters work Best

pirateninja writes "Dr. Gord Cormack decided to find and prove what the best spam filter is. In his study he looked at the major spam filters (DSPAM, SpamAssassin, etc.) along with those submitted by various academics. The results are quite surprising, with a previously unheard-of spam filter, which uses ideas from various compression algorithms, performing the best overall. He recently presented the results and methodology used in a presentation titled 'Spam Filters, Do they Work? and Can you prove it?'" Note that this is a video of his presentation.

Comments

GMail Spam Filter

[foxylad]

I use greylisting (gld to be specific) which works wonderfully. A couple of customers wanted even better filtering...

First I tried DSPAM, but they refused to train it so the results weren't good. Then I tried Spam Assasin, which also let through a suprising amount of spam - a lot more than my personal account on Gmail.

So I set up accounts on Gmail for them, and forwarded their mail to those accounts (after greylisting - don't want to burden GMail too much!). Gmail lets you set up forwarding, so I simply forwarded all the filtered mail back to a second account on my mailserver for the customer to pick up. Finally I wrote a python script that logs in to Gmail once a week to prevent the account being closed due to non-use.

A tad involved, but it works like a dream. Yet again Google comes out on top, this time in a market it doesn't even know it's in!