Slashdot Mirror
Live spam-catching contest at CEAS
noodleburglar writes "The 2007 Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (CEAS) will feature a live spam-catching contest. Entrants will be treated to a torrent of spam and must use their spam filtering technique to filter out as much as possible, while also letting legitimate messages. My money's on Spam Assassin." This ought to be a sweeps week television spectacular.
http://crm114.sourceforge.net/ using hyperspace! It's been working better than spam assassin for me.
Gmail, like SpamCop, has a group spam filter system. It looks at mail sent to a large number of recipients. The defining characteristic of spam is that it's sent to a large number of recipients, after all. If you're in a position to watch the incoming mail of a few million mailboxes, detecting spam is easy.
Suffice it to say that a doctor is likely to write an email like:
"Ted, I just read the news about Viagra in the New England Journal of Medicine. Very interesting results, though the error bars are a bit large to draw any major conclusions just yet. What do you think?"
Whereas a doctor rarely writes email like:
"NoW ava ilable is generic V1AGRA at low price! Generic, quality, all low price now!"
The point is that modern spam filters don't just look for "bad words" but consider relative word frequencies, the sender and receiver fields, word correlations, formatting elements, URLs, etc. Spam filters in your email client will be trained against email you typically send/receive, and so can be even more precise. Spammers of course try to make their emails include words so that they end up looking like real email, but if the filter is good enough, then the only way to get past it is to send an email that now lacks those critical spam elements (like the link you're supposed to click to buy the generic drug or whatever)...