Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam........
 

So I'm curious.... what spam filtering tools are people using? I've been playing with them a bit lately.

I've been using an anti-virus package on my mail server at work called RAV. Written in Romania, it was dirt cheap and did a fabulous job of smacking down viruses before they get to my users' computers. When they added on spam filtering in a later upgrade, I jumped on it. So far it has worked OK.

On my home computer, I have tried out Spamnix, which is an implementation of spamassassin as a Eudora for Windows plugin. It works pretty well, but with my mail at least missed a fair amount. It became onerous to be throwing out the missed spam into the re-filtering. Also, the filtering was quite slow (admittedly I have an older computer).

I'm currently trying out POPFile. POPFile is an implementation of Bayesian filtering that runs on Windows and sits as a proxy between your POP3 client (Eudora, Outlook, Mozilla, etc. etc.) and the server. The whole Bayesian concept is very simple and elegant... and it's damned effective!! I installed POPFile on Saturday before I had downloaded any mail, and then downloaded whatever mail I had and sorted it. Since that time it has correctly deduced which of 260 emails were spam and which were not, with 1 error.



So, what have you tried? what did you like, or not like?

so far my most effective spamkiller has been changing my email address.

The one that comes with yahoomail seems to work as well. I've not tried any of the third-party spambusters.

Re: Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam........
 

Anything new on the Spam front?

On my Unix shell, I have a pile of procmail filters that worked great for several years, but are growing progressively less effective. I need to sit down and work out some more aggressive algorithms for it before I end up abandoning the account.

On the Windows side, I've kept my addresses largely unknown to all but close friends, so I haven't had a problem.

I got 60 new e-mails today...29 of them were spam...and that was with me using Earthlink's Spaminator system. A year ago, I might have had 5-10 pieces of spam.

This shit is getting ridiculous.

A little sidenote, Syc, but something interesting about EarthLink's spaminator. They're going to add the option of only allowing emails from folks in your address book. People not in your address book get a message bumped back prompting them to ask you for permission to email you. You can also add whole domains to your address book. I think the external beta will start in a month or two.

The downside(s)? If you have half a brain, you can set this up in whatever mail program you have without EarthLink's help. Also, you have to use their "Total Access" product to use this functionality.

Oh, and to get back on topic? I don't use anything but Spaminator for my EarthLink addresses. I get relatively little spam on there. My yahoo and hotmail addresses are awful, though.

After further use, I can report that popfile is very good. The one drawback is it doesn't deal with multiple email accounts, and it's difficult (or impossible, I haven't decided yet) to run mail thru the filter when you check it away from that computer that is running popfile.

Funny...you know, I haven't used an address book in ages. I e-mail so few people that I know their information in my head.

I just happened to look at my spaminator account today...it's caught 366 e-mails in the past 10 days--though I believe that covers all our e-mail accounts (6 total). Still, it's obviously doing its job.

The majority of the spam I get is on my sycamoreland.com address. At first, I thought that maybe Earthlink wasn't catching ones sent to that address, since I use it as a forwarder to one of my earthlink addys, but sure enough, it catches e-mails for the sycamoreland addys as well.

I suspect that the vast majority of spam I get is due to posting on NG's. I should "correct" my addy accordingly.

Another excellent way to get spam is to be listed as a contact for a domain in WHOIS!

Favorite AntiSpam Program
 

I have two favorites:

1. For Outlook mail (when you run Exchange Server): Disruptor OL, which I bought and installed :). It's an amazingly good spam filter and it catches almost everything!

Out of the 300 spams I get a day from being a domreg and a bunch of common names @ diginexus.com, I get very few now.

2. For home, I run Spam Eater Pro. Every 5 minutes, this keeps my Netaxs (same as vsp) shell and my Earthlink POP3 accounts clean and happy. This has about a 95% success rate, and catches the really nasty stuff.

I agree with VSP. I've only had my netaxs shell for 6 years, but it's getting over 40 spams a day. Spam Eater Pro keeps me sane.

It's a problem. And it's only going to get worse with the large amounts of people that put up open servers or workstations with Sendmail or IIS5 not configured correctly.

Mitch

I have never given my email address out except in person to geeks who know better than to use the Outlook Address Book.

I get no spam in my inbox.

I have several domains :)
 

Dude,

The issue isn't whether you give it out or not.

There are also autoguesser bots out there, and I have collected MANY of their signatures from mail servers.

Things are at the point where the spammers are firing multiple random letter combinations at mail servers hoping something sticks.

It's not whether you give it out or not. We all have "waste" accounts we use :).

It just matters if your site is blocking a few major lists, usually SpamCop Blacklist and SPEWS.