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Re: Recent spam increase



Håkon Alstadheim wrote:
> Mike McCarty wrote:
> [about the penny-stock image spams]
> >Yes, I get several a day myself. The actual "text" of the message is
> >often actually an image, while the body of the message is randomly
> >selected sentences or words from a collection which would make a
> >Bayesian filter delete most of my e-mail.
> >
> >I delete them by hand, to prevent messing up my other filter which
> >is working reasonably well ...(snip)
> >
> I use a statistical filter (aka "bayesian") that seems to do a 
> reasonable job. I block most of the spam I get directly by other means, 
> but I submit some of the stock-peddling image spams I get through 
> mailing-lists to the filter. Since I began running the filter I've 
> received 30453 non-spam messages, caught 882 spams and had 36 false 
> positives, and it has been ages since the last false positive. This is 
> while submitting 202 mails for training puposes., that were missed by 
> the filter. Like I said, the spams I want to catch is just from a couple 
> of mailinglists that have been particuliarly badly hit, hence the low 
> spam ratio.
> 
> The filter I use is known as dspam <http://dspam.nuclearelephant.com/>. 
> I believe you might be pleasantly surprised by the other implementations 
> aswell. The filter has more than the message text to work with. 
> Everything from the MIME headers to the message headers contribute in 
> characterizing the mail, so even though the text is random dspam will 
> catch the spam.
> -- 
> 
> Håkon Alstadheim

Interesting, I just setup a smoothwall firewall last week and as part of the installation
decided to try the spam filter which happened to be dspam.  So far it seems to be
working well.  I'm still in training mode after just a few days, but already spam
has been greatly reduced.  Time will tell.  Best spam deterrent I've used yet.

scott



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