Spamassassin Beats CRM-114 In Anti-Spam Shootout 330
Simon Lyall writes "A new study of antispam software shows that Spamassassin performed well in various configurations along with Spamprobe , Bogofilter and Spambayes also came out good while CRM-114
failed to live up to its previous claims . The study shows: 'The best-performing filters reduced the volume of incoming spam from about 150 messages per day to about 2 messages per day.'"
Correct link to CRM-114 (Score:5, Informative)
The link in the article points to SpamBayes again.
Isn't Human Accuracy always 100% (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe I'm missing something human accuracy always going to be 100%? I tell the computer what is spam, it learns. I may decide that regardless of what it thinks, this last message is OK. So aside from clicking too fast or changing your mind (which is a common thing to do) how can a filter ever suggest it is be better then people at deciding what people want to see?
Re:Isn't Human Accuracy always 100% (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, given one message to classify as spam or ham you are going to get it right 100% of the time.
Given 8000 messages to classify the wonders of boredom is going to mean you make a mistake every so often (not an "oops I clicked the wrong button" mistake, but an "oops I put it in the wrong folder because the subject looked spammy and I couldn't be bothered checking the body" mistake).
In practice though, those stats on human accuracy are provided by having one person classify email that has been classified by others - which of course means some of the mistakes in fact be disagreements...
Re:Isn't Human Accuracy always 100% (Score:5, Funny)
Or, presonally I consider all email I get with the from hotmail.com is spam. But that is my opinion.
OT: btw, a friend at work actually got a Nigerian scam letter in the post. Because it was not email, he thought it was real.
Re:Isn't Human Accuracy always 100% (Score:4, Funny)
The Mozilla ThunderBird SPAM filter (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The Mozilla ThunderBird SPAM filter (Score:2, Interesting)
I have gone from a wopping 200 spam messages a day (a very old e-mail address) to the occational spam message once a week.
Leme do the math. 200*7 = 1400. 1399/1400 = 0.9992857 accruaccy. Not TOO bad
Re:The Mozilla ThunderBird SPAM filter (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The Mozilla ThunderBird SPAM filter (Score:5, Insightful)
Now if only I could get the rest of my mail configuration to be shared between evolution, mutt, and squirrelmail.
Re:The Mozilla ThunderBird SPAM filter (Score:4, Interesting)
Invasion (Score:2, Insightful)
I guess that is why there are privacy policies though.
aj
GroupShares Inc. [groupshares.com] - A Free and Interactive Stock Market community!
Re:Invasion (Score:2)
I'm running SpamAssassin at work. (Score:5, Insightful)
There are some false positives and some false negatives.
But I have it set to delete anything 12+. That gets rid of the worst of the worst spam. So far, not a single complaint of any email being deleted.
Everything else has the subject re-written so people can run their own rule set against it.
In the past 8 hours
1867 messages received
375 messages deleted
1266 messages flagged as spam
So, only a few hundred actual, good emails.
Of course, that's only 4 hours during the regular work day (and 4 hours after work). But you can see the proportions. It saves people a TON of time.
And it makes them happier when they don't have to constantly dig through crap to see if any real messages have arrived.
Now, those spam messages are NOT distributed evenly. Our HR manager had her email address posted on the website. So she gets about 20-25% of the spam.
It's not exactly Big Brother 'cause no human sees the deleted spam.
Re:I'm running SpamAssassin at work. (Score:2)
The two thresholds have been creeping down as the bayes system gets more trained. I started with 7 or greater getting redirected, and 15 or greater getting tossed...
If only I could convince work to use this great, free system. They're using a reall
Re:I'm running SpamAssassin at work. (Score:3, Insightful)
How do they know they are missing any emails to complain about it?
I had a recent argument with my email provider. They introduced blacklist filtering to eliminate the worst of their spam. In the process it also blacklisted some legitimate email. (The mails in question were Topic Reply notifications from a message board)
I dont have a problem with filtering, as long as there is a way to review undelivered mails
In my case I only realsied something
Re:I'm running SpamAssassin at work. (Score:3, Insightful)
other than the performance, i'm really happy with SA.
Quit acting like goddamn babies... (Score:5, Funny)
Baysian, gaysian. Real men hit delete.
No, REAL MEN... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Quit acting like goddamn babies... (Score:5, Funny)
#!/bin/sh
rm -f
Who needs email.
Re:Quit acting like goddamn babies... (Score:3, Funny)
and you will have email peace forever. ^_^
Re:Quit acting like goddamn babies... (Score:2)
echo 'SENDMAIL="NONE"' >> rc.conf
*real men* don't do sysv, or so I've heard.
I do sysv and I don't run sendmail.
I also am typing this on a Macintosh.
Re:Quit acting like goddamn babies... (Score:2)
Real men have a life instead of spending the day poking a small button over and over.
Re:Quit acting like goddamn babies... (Score:3, Insightful)
I assume you are not referring to the delete key.
I didn't RTFPDF... (Score:4, Interesting)
How many false positives though?
Re:I didn't RTFPDF... (Score:2)
Re:I didn't RTFPDF... (Score:2)
I use two... (Score:2, Interesting)
No HTML, Just ps or pdf, conclusions inside (Score:5, Informative)
Supervised spam filters are effective tools for attenuating spam. The best-performing filters reduced the volume of incoming spam from about 150 messages per day to about 2 messages per day. The corresponding risk of mail loss, while minimal, is difficult to quantify. The best-performing filters misclassified a handful of spam messages early in the test suite; none within the second half (25,000 messages). A larger study will be necessary to distinguish the asymptotic probability of ham misclassification from zero.
Most misclassified ham messages are advertising, news digests, mailing list messages, or the results of electronic transactions. From this observation, and the fact that such messages represent a small fraction of incoming mail, we may conclude that the filters find them more difficult to classify. On the other hand, the small number of misclassifications suggests that the filter rapidly learns the characteristics of each advertiser, news service, mailing list, or on-line service from which the recipient wishes to receive messages. We might also conjecture that these misclassifications are more likely to occur soon after subscribing to the particular service (or soon after starting to use the filter), a time at which the user would be more likely to notice, should the message go astray, and retrieve it from the spam file. In contrast, the best filters misclassified no personal messages, and no delivery error messages, which comprise the largest and most critical fraction of ham.
A supervised filter contributes significantly to the effectiveness of Spamassassin's static component, as measured by both ham and spam misclassification probabilities. Two unsupervised configurations also improved the static component, but by a smaller margin. The supervised filter alone performed better than than the static rules alone, but not as well as the combination of the two.
The choice of threshold parameters dominates the observed differences in performance among the four filters implementing methods derived from Graham's and Robinson's proposals. Each shows a different tradeoff between ham accuracy and spam accuracy. ROC analysis shows that the differences not accountable to threshold setting, if any, are small and observable only when the ham misclassification probability is low (i.e. hm
CRM-114 and DSPAM exhibit substantially inferior performance to the other filters, regardless of threshold setting. Both exhibit substantial learning throughout the email stream, leading us to conjecture that their performance might asymptotically approach that of the other filters. From a practical standpoint, this learning rate would be too slow for personal email filtering as it would take several years at the observed rate to achieve the same misclassification rates as the other systems. Both these systems were designed to be used in a train on error configuration, and do not self-train. This configuration could account for a slow learning rate as each system avails itself of the information in only about 1,000 of the 50,000 test messages. In an effort to ensure that we had not misinterpreted the installation instructions, we ran CRM-114 in a train-on-everything configuration and, as predicted by the author, the result was substantially worse.
Spam filter designers should incorporate interfaces making them amenable for testing and deployment in the supervised configuration (figure 4). We propose the three interface functions used in algorithm 1 - filterinit, filtereval, and filtertrain - as a standardized interface. Systems that self-train should provide an option to self-train on everything (subject to correction via filtertrain) as in algorithm 2.
Ham and spam misclassification proportions should be reported separately. Accuracy, weighted accuracy, and precision should be avoided as primary evaluation measures as th
Mozilla Messenger / Thunderbird Performance? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Mozilla Messenger / Thunderbird Performance? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Mozilla Messenger / Thunderbird Performance? (Score:2)
Re:Mozilla Messenger / Thunderbird Performance? (Score:2)
Just one example. I get spam from VIPClubber. I don't know why and I'm afraid to click the "Cancel Me" link because I didn't sign up for anything. Anyway, they don't spoof their headers. Everything from VIPClubber.com is spam. Thunderbird, after ~30 from VIPClubber, still lets some through. SB does not.
Perhaps the TB should integrate SB. This demonstrates the power of open-source software. Just im
SpamBayes + Thunderbird (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Mozilla Messenger / Thunderbird Performance? (Score:3, Informative)
Definitely agree.
I use the SpamBayes MSOutlook plugin for my work e-mail and it is extremely good at discriminating spam from ham. I use Thunderbird for my non-corporate e-mail. SpamBayes has two additional (and rather important features) that Thunderbird/Mozilla just don't have:
1. SpamBayes (at least the Outlook plug-in) actually has (3) levels of classification... definite ham, maybe, an
Re:Mozilla Messenger / Thunderbird Performance? (Score:3, Interesting)
Some anecdotal "evidence" for you: some of the users at my office run their own spam engines on their desktops because they're control freaks. I let them pass by SpamAssassin entirely. In my observation, SpamAssassin works WAY bette
Spamassasin is great! (Score:2, Informative)
Real way to block spam (Score:2, Interesting)
That should take care of the problems. The gov is now concentrating on this.
Re:Real way to block spam (Score:2, Insightful)
Except for making a new standard that's a requirement for doing business with federal agencies, just what do you think government's capable of doing regarding replacing protocols?
-PM
REAL REAL way to block spam (Score:2)
from orbit. That's the only way to be sure."
[Hudson] "F--kin' A..."
[Burke] "Ho-ho-hold on a second! The Earth has a
very substantial dollar value attached to it!"
[Ripley] "They can BILL me."
Re:Real way to block spam (Score:2)
Mailboxes and bulk mail just don't mix. Newsgroup notifications and such should use anoth
A little advice (Score:5, Funny)
I've had CRM114 running for a few months . . . (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I've had CRM114 running for a few months . . . (Score:3, Informative)
If I was to make an estimate, I'd say that the error rate is something like
Re:I've had CRM114 running for a few months . . . (Score:3, Interesting)
I try to teach the program the least possible (if a message doesn't look like spam for me, even if it is though, I do not teach it).
I also delete de ADV: (prefix) in the subject and the crm114 spam metadata (TAG) and fix it in general so it doesnt get confused when learning spam.
Bad teaching at the beggining leads to lower quality filtering (I did this
Good results with spamprobe (Score:3, Informative)
I receive approximately 10 legit emails/day and about 300 spam/day. I have only had 2 false positives overall (that's 2 out of about 100,000 total emails received) and on average only 2 spams/day split past the filter. Now I'm testing Spambayes on one of my most spammed accounts, but it's definitely much slower than spamprobe and not more accurate as far as I can tell.
compute farms for anti-spam AI? (Score:5, Informative)
From page 24: Hidalgo suggests the use of ROC curves, originally from signal detection theory and used extensively in medical testing, as better capturing the important aspects of spam filter performance.
Perhaps a distributed analysis system (similar to SETI@home [berkeley.edu]) could be used to combat spam. Not only could the idle time of bazillions of CPUs be levereaged to improve "signal" analysis, but perhaps the clients could analyize local incoming mail to corelate new trends in spam originators and then share that information with all of the other clients. Then you could combine that with the genetic evolution improvements of the F1 sim-cars recently mentioned [slashdot.org] on /.
So there's the high-level idea, now you smart people go make it work. :-)
Re:compute farms for anti-spam AI? (Score:5, Informative)
Spamassassin uses collaborative spam-tracking (Score:3, Informative)
Razor: Vipul's Razor is a collaborative spam-tracking database, which works by taking a signature of spam messages. Since spam typically operates by sending an identical message to hundreds of people, Razor short-circuits this by allowing the first person to receive a spam to add it to the database -- at which point everyone else will automatically block it.
This is a really cool.
Re:Spamassassin uses collaborative spam-tracking (Score:5, Informative)
So I'm not the only one... (Score:5, Informative)
I also found that crm114 gave poor results in comparison to other filters - but figured I must have set something up incorrectly...
Why don't people use catch-all accounts? (Score:5, Interesting)
- I only use my main email address with friends and family, and never post it online.
- Whenever I post an email address or register for anything online, I put thatsite@mydomain.com as my email address.
- All email is received by one account, but each message can have a different "to:" header. I set my filters to filter mail to different boxes. Email sent to amazon@mydomain.com goes to the amazon folder. Same with ebay, slashdot, whatever.
- Any time I start receiving spam, I just set my mail server to disregard email sent to whatever email address is getting the spam, and I can stop doing business with the company that sold my email address.
I receive on average 0 spams per day.Re:Why don't people use catch-all accounts? (Score:2)
Re:Why don't people use catch-all accounts? (Score:5, Informative)
I would recommend not using a catch all account, but if you have the domain, create, delete and rename email accounts as you need to...
Re:Why don't people use catch-all accounts? (Score:2)
Thankfully, my host has a 'blackhole' option for the default account. Turned that on and the spam volume dropped back to the previous level.
Re:Why don't people use catch-all accounts? (Score:3, Informative)
Already if a server tries to send the same email to more than three fake addresses at my company, I blacklist the IP for two days. Not just for email, but for any IP traffic. I did this to prevent trojans, but it's a somewhat effective spam deterrant as well.
Re:Why don't people use catch-all accounts? (Score:2)
Re:Why don't people use catch-all accounts? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's exactly when I decided to disable the "catch-all" and allow only specific addresses. Some spammer sent several hundred identical messages, in a few hours, to made-up names at my domain.
Catch-all is no longer a good idea in my opinion...
Re:Why don't people use catch-all accounts? (Score:2)
how many CORP_X accounts do you go through? ebay1@DOMAIN.TLD, ebay2@, ebay3@... ditching each once it starts to recieve spam.
A most interesting approach, though.
Re:Why don't people use catch-all accounts? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because you will always have one main 'obvious' address - be it something that goes on your business card, or something you tell to people you meet. For example, I use glen at glenmurphy.com.
Now all it takes is one slip - someone you know to get a virus, whatever, and your address is 'out there' for the taking. Your only possible recourse then is to stop using that address, but for some people that's just not an option, and it's a just bit defeatist to sit there surrendering email address after email address.
Re:Why don't people use catch-all accounts? (Score:2)
Some of us don't use spam filters to give us a feeling of life...
Re:Why don't people use catch-all accounts? (Score:2)
Re:Why don't people use catch-all accounts? (Score:2, Interesting)
I even got spam from the president of the univesity I work for. (Why spam, because it was a political response to a news paper article that had nothing to do with my job.) When I asked to be removed, I was told I couldn't opt-out, since I worked for the university. So I removed my e-mail address from the offical database. I was lucky. It got worse. I know five other people who did the
Re:Why don't people use catch-all accounts? (Score:5, Informative)
Several viruses were sent to jane@mydomain, pete@mydomain, sedlskjl@mydomain etc.
Inevitably these same addresses are now being used for Spam and viruses as the source OR destination address (meaning I get bounce messages as well).
I HATE it when moron anti-Virus gateway administrators set them up to return confirmed viruses to sender with a polite note - except I am NOT the sender, my address was spoofed.
Unfortunately I have been using the catch-all trick for so long (e.g. ebay.com@mydomain etc.) that it's not as simple as turning it off or setting up filters - I don't even know what all the 'legit' addresses are as I used to create them on the fly and may only get email to some of them once a year or so.
I only ever busted one person for passing on the account details which was satisfying, but I am getting PLENTY of Spam/viruses now instead.
I use the excellent Spam Gourmet [spamgourmet.com] now for instantly creating disposable addresses with the added advantage that they can actually die when I want/need them to.
Another data point. (Score:5, Interesting)
I must say I've been pleasantly surprised with the spam filtering it provides and it has been a lot easier than the hoops I used to utilize to clean out my inbox.
DSPAM (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:DSPAM (Score:4, Informative)
This is interesting considering the harsh words the DSPAM author directs towards SpamAssassin in the DSPAM FAQ [nuclearelephant.com]. In contrast, I think, the SpamAssassin developers say they are interested in testing the "dobly" noise reduction technique that DSPAM employs, see SpamAssassin bug 3078 [spamassassin.org].
Re:DSPAM (Score:3, Informative)
No DSPAM (Score:2, Interesting)
After using each for a couple months at a time, I found DSPAM to be by far the most effective (after it was properly trained)
DSPAMS claim "DSPAM (as in De-Spam) is an extremely scalable, open-source statistical hybrid anti-spam filter. While most commercial solutions only provide a mere 95% accuracy (1 error in 20), a majority of DSPAM users frequently see between 99.95%
Problems with Bayesian filtering (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Problems with Bayesian filtering (Score:3, Informative)
Then recently I suddenly started getting hit with 20 spam messages a day, and I noticed most of those were using lots of common words to bypass bogofilter.
This is very surprising to me, and it's not my experience at all (also using bogofilter). My bogofilter doesn't seem to be fooled one bit by those common words, at least not in a way that causes it to missclassify spam. That makes sense, actually, since most common words end up being viewed by the filter as neutral, and if the spammers want to sell
the true cause of the majority of spam... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:the true cause of the majority of spam... (Score:2)
All sarcasm aside, I DO ask for it with my hotmail account (see above) and that just makes me so glad that I keep my other addresses quiet!
SpamAssassin used to work but recently... (Score:3, Interesting)
Spam sucks. Everyone stop buying the products advertised and it'll be over. But then again, people will always be too dumb for an easy solution like that (reminds me of the gooback southpark...)
Issues with testing corpus (Score:5, Interesting)
Their train on errors approach may simulate what goes on with some filters it doesn't reflect the scenario where there is a initial dataset to be trained on _before_ new messages are processed. Instead, each message is in essence 'new'. So in their tests the machine learning filters start out knowing nothing, but SpamAssassin starts out with its inbuilt ruleset. Not exactly fair.
-Greg
Re:Issues with testing corpus (Score:2, Insightful)
Not exactly fair.
Huh, since when did spammers start playing fair!. This is about winning, not software political correctness.
Also on the unbalanced dataset, I train my filter with spam corpuses that reflect my what I receive in my email. Many accounts receive 10 spams for every ham. The biggest thing that I've had to retrain on is receipts for airplane tickets, spamassassin seems to think they are spam the first time I receive them, and from the article, they had the same issues too.
why I don't use spam filters (Score:2, Interesting)
i use email for business and receive many letters from clients. i just afraid to loose any of these because of a spam filter. therefore even when i used one, i checked all the emails anyway.
SpamAssassin is a dud (Score:2)
I use Netscape's Bayesian filter as a second tier, and that removes about 60% of the remaining spam.
SpamCop was better, until IronPort bought them and they went black-hat, with Bonded Spammer [bondedsender.com] and the Spam Engine [ironport.com].
Re:SpamAssassin is a dud (Score:2)
There's a wide range of things that could be called "spam assassin", but without competent administrators who keep the program and the rulesets up to date, the effectiveness can degrade significantly, especially in a vanilla install of an older version, that's never been trained.
Re:SpamAssassin is a dud (Score:2)
X-Spam-Status: No, hits=1.1 required=4.0 tests=HTML_40_50,HTML_MESSAGE,
HTML_TAG_EXISTS_TBODY,MIME_HTML_ONLY,NO_REAL_NAME, RCVD_IN_SORBS autolearn=no version=2.60
The mail content is "Major income on eBay", sent via a free account on Netster. If it can't recognize that as spam, it's not doing much.
I turned the threshold down from 5 to 4; at 5, it
Bayes SHOULD be better than vanilla SpamAssassin (Score:3, Interesting)
That's because the Bayesian system will LEARN from you what you consider to be spam and ham.
I use SpamAssassin with Bayesian filtering turned on and it catches over 90% of the spam. But then I've fed it a decent sized corpus.
Active Spam Killer (Score:2)
I've been using SpamAssassin about 6 months (Score:2, Interesting)
Spamgourmet (antichef) and SpamSieve (Score:5, Informative)
Your message stats: 339 forwarded, 43,796 eaten. You have 155 disposable address(es).
yeah, that's right, thanks to disposable addresses I *haven't* read 43,457 spam emails! When I do need (want) to use my real address, I use SpamSieve (with Entourage X) - very good baysean filter (not sure if it Mac only or not).
Re: SpamSieve (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd like to second SpamSieve [c-command.com]. If more than one piece of spam gets through in a day (where each day I receive > 500 pieces of email), I am truly surprised. My stats for June are:
Works for me. Oh, the false positive was a list that I just signed up for. They sent a confirmation mail, I checked to see if it was caught (it was), and marked it as "good". Piece of cake.
POPFile? (Score:3, Interesting)
Would be interesting to see how that message sample reacts against more spam filtering technologies, or even webmails with spam protection integration.
Re:POPFile? (Score:5, Interesting)
It was amazingly accurate, with about one mistake per thousand emails once I had it trained. I'll go back to it if I start to get a bunch of crap in my in-box. I remember reading that spammers would test their emails against the most popular anti-spam filters, but they still almost never got through Popfile.
I tried SpamAssassin as well, after I had some issues with PopFile (it would stop responding after a large volume of email), and it was more difficult to set up, and didn't have the nice configuration options of Popfile.
I keep hearing about how great spamassasssin is... (Score:2)
Counterintuitive Advertising (Score:5, Interesting)
What happens when you constantly shove something in someone's face is that they learn to ignore it. Either consciously or subconsciously. In the case of advertising if someone is shown an ad and they aren't interested and another ad is shown there's a very good chance they won't even notice it. Even if they would have been interested in what it was offering. This is because they were annoyed by the first ad so they just mentally block any additional ads.
This is why the response rate to spam is so terrible. People for the most part just subconsciously ignore it. It's just noise.
Advertisers like radio stations because it tends to be a captive audience. People are very unlikely to turn the station when ads come on. However there is one local station that I've learned to turn the channel on when the ads start because I know I'm going to get to my destination before another song comes on. There are other stations that I don't change the channel on because I know it's just a short break.
Just like the guy pumping out 2985 ads that no one clicks on, spammers would benefit immensly by pulling a large chunk of the ads. People are more likely to notice when they aren't bombarded by ads and the response percentage goes up.
It seems counterintuitive that less advertising means a greater response but that's actually the case.
I normally notice the ad banners on Slashdot because that's pretty much all the advertising there is. I rarely ever notice the text ads. Even though they're placed on the left side in the best position as anyone who scrolls the page is probably going to see them. Slashdot's problem is that the ads blend in with the web-site's color scheme too well so they're pretty much invisible to anyone with a scroll wheel.
On GameDev the site is so littered with advertising that I never notice it anymore. By the time I close the stupid popup ads that circumvent Google's pop up blocker using evil little tricks I'm too annoyed to even look at the other ads.
Web-sites get desperate and think more ads == more money. And the actual result is less valuable ad space because the click thru rate is so low and fewer clicks because users tune the ads out which results in less money than if they had focused on the click thru percentage rather than the number of impressions. If you have a web-site with a high click thru rate advertisers are more likely to pay more because they know that if they show an ad there's a very good chance they'll get a click thru.
But then I'm guess spammers have never taken a course in marketing or bothered to think about things from their potential customer's perspective.
Keeping ineffective ads visible hurts the effectiveness of the better ads. Spammers are in effect destroying themselves in that area. As are ad happy web-sites.
Ben
DSPAM. (Score:5, Interesting)
I have 17 DNS-based blacklists in front of it, because I would rather block the messages at the network interface than filter them with my own resources, but those that slip through don't stand much of a chance of reaching my inbox. I have had my current email address out there on the web and in Usenet for six years, so I see a lot of junk -- DSPAM stops all but one or two per month. SpamAssassin can't even come close to that.
CRM114 Author Response (Score:3, Informative)
I can also state that *do* run CMR114 myself; I also run SpamAssassin (regularly maintained by the systems staff) on a parallel account. I find that SA gets about 90+ percent of what makes it past the firewall's immediate RBL lists (which matches Prof. Cormack's Figure 8 pretty closely); CRM114 nails 99.9% or more (this week, ending June 21, 2004, my CRM114 stats are 2528 nonspam and 1114 spam messages, and had just 1 error (a false reject) which is 99.972% accuracy.
I have gotten reports from some very happy users who are seeing similar accuracies; I've also gotten sad reports similar to Prof. Carmack's that show very weak accuracy.
I can conclude from this (and other reports) that filter performance varies _greatly_ with spam mix - that is to say, Your Mileage Will Vary.
Further, consider Fig 15, which compares CRM114's accuracy with respect to nonspam v. spam. Note that the two curves are displaced considerably, by a factor of accuracy between 3 and 5 times!
This is odd, because CRM114 is _entirely_ symmetrical; it does NOT have any predisposition toward (or against) erring on the side of caution; the only difference between nonspam and spam is the names of their files, which could be changed to "foo.css" and "bar.css" (or even interchanged) without affecting anything else.
Therefore, the two accuracy curves _should_ therefore lie on top of each other; there is no difference in the processing. The fact that the nonspam v. spam curves seem to differ by a factor of 3 to 5 in magnitude gives me some reason to believe that the setup issues Prof. Carmack encountered never really were completely addressed.
-Bill Yerazunis
And SpamAssassin is just getting better (Score:4, Informative)
But SpamAssassin is just getting better and better. Version 3.0 is coming up, and 3.0-pre1 [gmane.org] was recently released. I do not have a test system available for it, but those who have may want to take it for a spin.
Especially for large sites, this is extremely interesting. It adds relational database support for the Bayes database, so it should be a lot easier to set up on a large site.
I find the lack of individual training the main reason why SA works so well for me, but not very well at my old university.
Re:in related news (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:in related news (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:in related news (Score:2)
RBLs have been around for years, but the amount of spam Spamassassin catches on its way in to me is ever-increasing. If RBLs worked, the spam problem would have been solved years ago.
On the other hand, the amount of spam getting past Spamassassin to me is pretty steady. I guess that indicates it's getting better. Mo
Re:in related news (Score:4, Interesting)
It's reassuring to know that the "authorities" have effectively reduced the number of messages through my server by 10-14k per day......What great guys, those 'authorities', aren't they thoughtful and quick to respond. We've only been waiting for a spam-relief law for....10 years and they finally gave one to us. Oh wait....SpamAssassin is what reduced those messages.
The reason we don't wait for the gov to step in and take care of business is that THEY'VE DONE NOTHING SO FAR. You expect me to believe the government will solve my spam problems? I'm not holding my breath.
A combination of RBLs, DNSBLs, F-Prot, and SpamAssassin is what reduced the number of messages sent through my servers. I'm interested in results NOW, not legislation tomorrow.
Re:Holy Shit.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Okay, but what about... (Score:4, Interesting)
You keep one account for people who don't know you. You spam check that one. You put that on business cards, use it to sign up for porn sites, and post it on slashdot.
You keep another account for responding to email. You set that as your reply-to. You do not spam check it.
This way, there is a way to reach you for customers, clients and friends that will ALWAYS work. Call it the direct line. And, there's a way for people to introduce themselves to you. Call it the "front desk." Anyhow, with SpamAssassin (which includes a bayesian filter, btw, which can be autotrained to learn spam-like language from other mail it sets up), most of the bullshit calls will be correctly tagged and most of the incoming calls will get to you. I haven't had a false positive in months. But I train the thing like Rocky Balboa.
Re:Why am I so Blessed? (Score:4, Funny)
Because the 15 junk mails put you over quota?
Re:Why am I so Blessed? (Score:4, Insightful)
I do all 4. I get my share of spam. It's not a HUGE deal, but it made it worth my while to get a spam filter.
Re:What d'you think spamassissin would make of thi (Score:2)