Spam Advise

[Parker, Ron]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Steven Elling [mailto:ellings at kcnet.com]

> Is anyone using Spambayes or another program based on 
> Bayesian Analysis and, 
> if so, how successful has it been at removing spam?

At home I was running SpamBlocker which is simply a procmail filter set.
Some of my less technical friends with email addresses for the larger
portals would errantly get filed into my folder of blocked mail.  This does
not mean it was recognized as spam, but you may need to look at it.  I'd
then add their address to a whitelist.  It work well enough.

But a while back I became curious about other solutions.  Since then I have
been running bogofilter from procmail and I have a couple macros in mutt to
retag things as spam, or not.  It works well. It's even starting to
recognize spam from this list without misclassifying legitimate list mail.

At work with Outlook talking to an Exchange server, I was using Spamunnition
it worked about as well as bogofilter.

Just this week I decided to try POPFile with Outclass.  The Outclass plugin
removes a little functionality from POPFile, but they both allow you to
classify email into multiple folders.  Against the recommendations of the
authors, I deactivated all my rule wizard rules just to see how good the
software was.

I am surprised sometimes it learned to recognize a mailing list or project
related email after just flagging one email for the given folder.  It has
been able to do things that the rule wizard couldn't.  When people use an
alias to send email to a mailing list, I don't have to update my rules.  It
can move all mail going to kclug at kclug.org, KC-LUG, or kclug into my KCLUG
folder just fine.  

Also I have email from our "correction reporting" system (their bugs I tell
you, bugs!) that is hard to classify.  This is complicated by the fact that
we have outsourced some of our development (the fun part) to a group that
uses a different problem reporting system which kind-of integrates with
ours.  The only thing distinctive about any of this mail is that it always
contains "->", which is a pretty common C idiom seen on KCLUG, LKML, etc.
POPFile with Outclass rapidly learned to separate internal bug reports from
external bug reports while filing external follow ups to our internal
reports in the internal bug report folder.  Those are important to separate
because I have to follow up on them and their bug reporting system sends us
hundreds of reports per week.

POPFile and Outclass also seem to recognize MS security reports that aren't
marked as such and separates them from all the MS spam, regional and
otherwise.

-- 
Ron "why does all the good stuff go overseas" Parker