[Air-l] screening out spam

[Ellis Godard]

A belated "seconded!" in re SpamBayes. I've used it for quite some time,
with consistent and powerful results: I hardly ever see spam in my inbox,
and it so rarely misclassifies nonspam as spam that I've stopped checking
the "Junk mail" folder for possible mistakes.

The only problem I've had with SpamBayes was when I started using Taskline
as well. Both are Outlook plugins, and normally work fine. But my Outlook
tasklist has over 400 items, so that Taskline soon fills the forms cache.
Tools> Options> Other> Advanced> CustomForms> ManageForms> Clear Cache, once
a week or so, fixes that. Which is important, because I probably couldn't do
without either of these plugins.

-eg 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: air-l-aoir.org-bounces at listserv.aoir.org 
> [mailto:air-l-aoir.org-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf 
> Of Frank Schaap
> Sent: Tuesday, August 17, 2004 5:03 AM
> To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
> Subject: Re: [Air-l] screening out spam
> 
> 
> Gary Thompson wrote:
> > The recent spate of messages from those trying to 
> unsubscribe reminds 
> > me
> > that about 2/3 of everything I get via e-mail-even with an academic 
> > address-is spam. I've got my "rules" set up so as to try to 
> catch some 
> > of this:
> 
> Since you talk about "rules" I suppose you're using Microsoft 
> Outlook (Express).
> 
> > --if the subject line contains certain keywords, e.g., "market,"
> > "drugs," "investment," "penis," "casino," then it goes into 
> my trash box.
> > --if the from line contains "admin," then it goes in the trash box
> > --if the "to" says "undisclosed recipients," etc.
> > 
> > I'm wondering whether others have had success with similar rules, as
> > opposed to installing spam-killing software (and as for 
> that, how well 
> > does it work, when spammers garble key words so as to avoid 
> screening, 
> > e.g., Vi*ag*kra or other combinations).
> 
> It helps a little... but unless your e-mail client lets you write 
> sophisticated regular expressions into the rules (which 
> Outlook doesn't 
> afaik), you quickly end up with countless not terribly 
> effective rules. I 
> tried this too before our department admins installed server 
> side spam 
> filtering on the Exchange server.
> 
> One of the reasons that 'professional' spam fighters have 
> moved beyond 
> 'mere' rule based filtering is that because spamfilters have 
> to be made 
> available to the public, dedicated spammers will quickly find 
> ways around 
> static rules for filtering spam.
> 
> A Bayesian spamfilter is a more dynamic type of filter that 
> goes through a 
> learning period in which you tell it which messages are spam 
> and which 
> messages are ham. It classifies a number of characteristics of these 
> messages and depending on their statistical occurrence in 
> either category 
> incoming messages are sorted into either the spam or the ham category.
> 
> Mozilla based e-mail clients such as the Mozilla Suite and 
> Thunderbird 
> <http://mozilla.org> contain bayesian filters. Personally I'm 
> very pleased 
> with the end result. I haven't seen a spam message up close 
> for a long while 
> and I haven't had any false positives after a rather short 
> training period. 
> The Mozilla based clients support both POP and IMAP.
> 
> But, if you just have to use Outlook to access your 
> department's Exchange 
> server and your department admins refuse to install 
> spamfiltering on the 
> server, you can run a bayesian filter in your own Outlook install (if 
> they've given you enough permissions to install it). Have a look at 
> Spambayes <http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/>
> 
> Eventually I guess we'll see some sort of authentication 
> system that makes 
> e-mail traceable. For the moment I just try to keep my 
> personal, non-list 
> related e-mail addresses off the web and out of newsgroups. 
> For that kind of 
> use I set up free throw-away accounts that I use for a couple 
> of months 
> untill they become useless.
> 
> HTH
> 
> Frank.
> 
> -- 
> My Personal Portal (TM)
> http://fragment.nl/
> 
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