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Re: How to filter out mailing list spam with bogofilter



On Wed, Jan 09, 2008 at 11:31:48PM +0100, Nigel Henry wrote:
> On Wednesday 09 January 2008 22:03, John Hasler wrote:
> > Nigel Henry writes:
> > > I am genuinly trying to resolve the problem of filtering out spam, that
> > > occasionally turns up on mailing lists. As I've said bogofilter works
> > > fine with non mailing list spam, but something extra is needed to deal
> > > with mailing list spam.
> >
> > I find that Spamassassin works fine on spam that comes via mailing-lists.
> > Do you somehow have the lists whitelisted?
> >
> > --
> > John Hasler
> 
> No Whitelisting. Bogofilter was setup in it's default configuration with 
> Kmail, and has dealt with all the ordinary non mailing list spam with no 
> problems.

I don't know much about bogofilter as I've only used it a little and
never really touched its configuration, *but*, I have this little
insight. 

My spamassassin setup does a pretty good job. I get a handful of
regular spam per day (between say 2 and 5). On this list I might get
one a week or so. Now, I'm not sure what my success rate is in terms
of catching regular spam, but I think a little can be inferred.

I think we get somewhere around 75 legit mails per day onthis
list. (just guessing). The listmasters have claimed that something
well over 99% of the mail that hits the servers is legit. Taking it at
99%, that's 7425 spam mails hitting the servers a day. 

For those few days we were getting (I think) a wide-open spam load. I
saw about 30-40 per day for those couple of days. I would say, then,
that spamassassin was doing a damn good job. Especially considering
that d-u spam does have a slightly different flavor, and all d-u mail
has quite a different header structure than a lot of the spam we see
(probably making it harder to catch once it's been processed by the
list). So how did your spam solution fair? How many did you see in
your inbox compared to the potential amount? 

BTW, these numbers a pretty much pulled out of thin air. But I think
that if you got anything less that a couple hundred a day, you should
probably be pretty happy with the results



> 
> I think that using bogofilters ignorelist.db may resolve the problem of spam 
> from mailing lists, but without any spammy mailing lists to use as a test, 
> it's a bit of a lost cause at the moment.
> 
> Maybe I should just leave things as they are. The only mailing lists I've had 
> spam problems with are the Debian lists, and on both occasions the problem 
> was resolved within 2 or 3 days. Not a problem really, but I was just trying 
> to see if bogofilter could deal with spam from a mailing list, where normally 
> all the mail that came from the mailing list was hammy, and bogofilter was 
> saying that anything from the Debian lists was ham, because usually it is.

I think this is a factor of d-u being pretty clean most of the
time. That makes it harder, with the significant header load making it
look hammy, for bogofilter to catch it. 

very much just my .02 

A

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