Each month, we go through our spamtraps (E-mail addresses designed to collect spam), to find out which spam tests were most effective at catching spam. The results this month are based on over 210,000 spams that were received, all in November 2003. This represents more than a 25% increase in spam over last month. In November 2003 we received over 15 times as much spam as in November, 2002. Although several important spam tests were recently forced to close by spammers, our stats show that spam can still be caught effectively.

The following is a list of tests that we run against the E-mails arriving at the spamtraps, and what percentage of the spam they caught (it may be easier to read if you use a fixed-width font):


WEIGHT10 99.59% WEIGHT20 97.70% NOLEGITCONTENT 97.54% SPAMMANAGER 95.45% SNIFFER 94.07% IPNOTINMX 93.07% SPAMCHK 92.49% SPAMCOP 78.80% MAILDEFLECTOR 69.09% DSBLALL 60.72% DSBL 60.52% BLARSBL 50.28% NOABUSE 44.99% BADHEADERS 41.33% FIVETENSRC 40.46% NOPOSTMASTER 37.13% NJABLPROXIES 28.93% REVDNS 27.96% HELO 25.34% ROUTING 20.95% RSL 15.34% SPAMHAUS 14.98% IPWHOIS 14.55% XBL 13.79% SPAMHEADERS 11.23% DSN 9.68% BLITZEDALL 9.46% NJABLSOURCES 9.34% COMMENTS 9.10% BASE64 7.21% FABELSOURCES 5.08% NJABLDUL 5.03% LNGSDUL 4.63% FIVETENIGNORE 2.80% SPAMBAG 2.69% MAILFROM 2.65% BADWHOIS 2.22% NJABL 2.09% VOX 1.97% INTERSIL 1.46% ORDB 1.40% DNSRBL-DUN 0.62% PIGS 0.61% FIVETENOPTIN 0.60% JIPPG-DUL 0.53% LNGSBLOCK 0.44% KUNDENSERVER 0.40% NONENGLISH 0.38% DSBLMULTI 0.26% KITHRUP 0.21% DNSMAILLIST 0.13% DEVNULL 0.04% FIVETENMULTI 0.04% FIVETENOTHER 0.03% JIPPG-DULJP 0.01% FLOWGO 0.00% FIVETENWEBFORM 0.00% LNGSSRC 0.00%


The WEIGHT10 and WEIGHT20 tests are a weighting system that assigns a weight to each E-mail, based on the spam tests that fail, so they don't really count as spam tests by themselves (but, they show that you can catch as much as 97-99+% of spam with extremely few false positives, and without relying on a single spam test). It is also important to note that different tests are more likely to produce false positives (such as the IPNOTINMX, REVDNS, and SPAMHEADERS tests, that all catch a lot of spam, but catch a lot of legitimate mail as well); those tests need to be used in a weighting system, so E-mail will only be marked as spam if it fails a combination of tests. The NOLEGITCONTENT and IPNOTINMX tests were designed to help identify legitimate E-mail (rather than spam), which accounts for their high percentages.


It is interesting to note that at least 41% of the spam in November could safely be caught by the BADHEADERS test (since no RFC-compliant mail client will send out E-mail that fails the BADHEADERS test).

There are 3 spam tests that catch over 90% of the spam in our spamtraps: SNIFFER ( http://www.sortmonster.com ), SPAMMANAGER ( http://www.spammanager.com ), and SPAMCHK ( www.spamchk.com ) (at its strictest setting).

More information on most of the spam tests shown above can be found at http://www.declude.com/junkmail/support/ip4r.htm . You can look up an IP address using the Spam Database Lookup tool at http://www.DNSstuff.com to see what spam databases it is listed in. The most recent 20 spams in our spamtraps, and the tests they failed, can be found at http://www.declude.com/spamtrap.htm .

-Scott
---
Declude JunkMail: The advanced anti-spam solution for IMail mailservers.
Declude Virus: Catches known viruses and is the leader in mailserver vulnerability detection.
Find out what you have been missing: Ask for a free 30-day evaluation.


---
[This E-mail was scanned for viruses by Declude Virus (http://www.declude.com)]


To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/

Reply via email to