From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,103b407e8b68350b X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-01-06 17:20:39 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!logbridge.uoregon.edu!news.stealth.net!news.stealth.net!news.astraweb.com!news-small.astraweb.com!news-xfer.cox.net!p01!news2.central.cox.net.POSTED!53ab2750!not-for-mail From: Ted Dennison User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021212 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: [off-topic] spam-filters References: <3E147D79.2070703@cogeco.ca> <4519e058.0301031434.51a0c880@posting.google.com> <81NR9.112823$Y86.60750@news2.central.cox.net> <1ciS9.217$Z74.1099@dfw-service2.ext.raytheon.com> In-Reply-To: <1ciS9.217$Z74.1099@dfw-service2.ext.raytheon.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <9WpS9.115438$Y86.620@news2.central.cox.net> Date: Tue, 07 Jan 2003 01:19:01 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 68.12.51.201 X-Complaints-To: abuse@cox.net X-Trace: news2.central.cox.net 1041902341 68.12.51.201 (Mon, 06 Jan 2003 20:19:01 EST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 06 Jan 2003 20:19:01 EST Organization: Cox Communications Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:32651 Date: 2003-01-07T01:19:01+00:00 List-Id: 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.