Re: [off-topic] spam-filters

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

Wes Groleau wrote:
> 
>> joking. My ISP caught 37 for January 3). But I almost never have to 
>> look at a spam any more. I think in the last week Mozilla let about 2 
>> slip through, and hit one false positive.
> 
> 
> Can it catch them just by headers, or does it evaluate
> for spam AFTER it downloads the entire piece of crap,
> complete with HTML bloat (generated by Microsoft Word
> or some equally lame thing that toggles styles on and
> off multiple times on every line) and all the stupid
> graphic attachments?

Its the contents. Mozilla downloads your email (through pop3 or smtp or 
whatever), then examines the contents. That's obviously not as ideal as 
some kind of server-side filtering, but if you would have been 
downloading that email anyway without it, it doesn't hurt you any either.

> I just route my mail through despammed.com - a free
> forwarding service.  I see one or two spams per month.

To do that, you have to use only the despammed address. The Mozilla 
software works with the same address that I've been using for 6 years 
(and I don't want to change, lest some old friends loose me).

 >
 > There are other such services.  One is myrealbox.com.
 > Another is mailircuit.com (although I haven't seen it
 > in a year, and it might have become a pay service).

The filtering I said my ISP does is provided by BrightMail. I don't know 
how much better Despammed is than BrightMail, but I suspect they use 
mostly the same methods. Typically a combination of matching against 
known bad senders, looking for header munging, and checking contents 
against blacklists. The first two methods are hardly exhaustive, and the 
last is always one step behind the spammers.

The nice thing about the Baesean filtering method is that you train it 
yourself to recognise what *you* consider to be spam. Once its got a 
reasonably good sample size of your email and spam to work with, its 
damn tough to fool. A spam would have to be worded quite unlike your 
typical spams, and quite like normal correspondence. It'd be tough to 
squeeze a sales-pitch through that.

> Can Mozilla spam-check the mail and then hand it off
> to the mail-reader I prefer?

I haven't played around with the rules enough to see if there's 
something like that in there. Probably not. This is a feature that's 
built into the Mozilla mail reader.

However, I do know that there are several other baesean filter projects 
out there, some that work as straight filters. If your email tool of 
choice can import stuff in the method one of those uses (and I suspect 
at least one somewhere acts as a pop3 proxy), then you'd be in business. 
I think when last I looked I found several, but none that worked on 
Windows and were Free.

The nice deal about Mozilla is that its built right into the mail tool.