Re: [OT] spam advice

["Gary Hennigan" <glhenni@sandia.gov>]

hugh@wacka.mjr.org writes:
> at the bottom of many spam-type emails there is a get out clause or
> something to remove my name from the database. Surely clicking on this
> link/sending an email to the adress specified simply verifies that your
> address is valid?
> 
> Is it adviseable to attempt to use these measures to be removed from
> lists? or just keep on writing filitering rules?

I've generally avoided doing this for the very reason you state, it
might just verify for the spammers that your email address is valid
and it'll get "bumped up" to a "premium" list and they can charge more
for it. I'm paranoid though! ;)

I've had great luck with bogofilter (it's in unstable and testing I
believe). It uses Bayesian statistics to try and determine if an email
message is spam. Of course the drawback is that you have to "train" it
by feeding it spam, and non-spam, to analyze. In my experience this is
a short duration process. After feeding it maybe 20 spams it was
getting it right about 95% of the time. It also seems to be getting
more and more accurate as time goes by. It's easy to setup a procmail
rule (examples in the man pages) so that all mail passes through
bogofilter and thus it improves itself with time. When necessary, you
can feed it back mistakes to reverse what it learned before.

Anyway, I've been very happy with it.

Gary