Title: Message
Chase:
We did this test
with someone else in another list. We were testing something and had them
forward me their spam.
What I learned was
actually quite interesting. Their spam was totally different from what we
used to get. Different spammers, different type of content.. I know it
sounds strange but since then I have tested it with two other folks and I have
seen similar results. Not all spam are created equal.
It seems like
certain lists get bought and sold and somehow the type of spam you receive is
highly a function of the region, etc. etc.
Recently an
organization switched their mail to us and all of a sudden we found out that our
spam mailbox had over 200 spam in it. We delete our spam when they satisfy
a certain criteria so typically we don't see more than 20 spam in the spam
mailbox - these spam are typically in the margin that require examination.
If they are spam they get added to our database and if not they get released for
delivery as false positives. After one month of managing email for
this organization our spam mailbox is again at 10-20 emails a
day.
Anyway-- all I am
trying to say is if you ask for spam from different people be prepared to get
swamped with what may never apply to you- this is specially true if someone
sends you spam from a different country.
For that test we
setup an address like [EMAIL PROTECTED] and simply ran our tests against that
mailbox.
Just some food for
thought.
Regards,
Kami
I have
what may seem like a humerous question, at first. I was wondering if anyone knew
of a mailing list that receives only spam... The purpose would be to treat this
list as a corpus for training the Bayesian filters.
Right now,
I am having a hard time convincing our 1,000 or so users to put the time and
effort into classifying email as spam. The next best this, I figure, is to get
novel spam pre-classified from an outside source.
I have
found a great website http://www.spamarchive.org/ dedicated
to collecting spam, but currently you have to download the 5,000 messages per
day via FTP and then get them into iMail. A mailing list would be so much
easier.
What do
you guys think? If no one knows of anything like this, I might be willing to set
something up. I'm sure many of us have old unused email accounts that receive
nothing but spam. It should not be hard to set those to auto-forward to a
particular address.
-Chase
Network
and Systems Engineer
Bullhorn,
Inc.
125 B
St.
Boston,
MA 02127
p. 617.464.2440 ex 119
m. 617.512.0326
www.bullhornstaffing.com
