> On the front page of todays's press there is a story of a spam > merchant who lives in CHC, basically lauding his rise to riches.
Hopefully The Press will follow it up by plenty of coverage of the result of the actions by these rotters. > has anyone got bayseian filtering going on their mail server spamassassin can be hooked into MTAs. I only use it on client filtering. It is supposed to be *the* state of the art spam filter. Btw I think all this bayesian stuff is overrated. It's not the golden bullet. Read the instructions for the bayesian filter in spamassasssin first. It says "must be trained to be effective", "must be trained with thousands of hand-sorted emails, both spam and non-spam", and "training with a huge number of spam and only a few non-spam is not unlikely to have the opposite effect", read make spam detection rates worse. What do you do with emails which contain some header rubbish and an empty body? How does it trip up the training, if so? Should you run mailing list emails through the spam filter (their headers show signs of automated mass mailouts)? You could of course try and find a better bayesian filter. Let us know when you have. Without having done it myself, I'm sure google has plenty of discussions on why none of the techniques really always work. This was also the conclusion of the article(s) recently in New Scientist. (My personal take is that something will only happen once the Americans change their laws such that you can sue spammers' balls off, or else huge corporates are getting past some iration threshold *and* find a means to combat the problem effectively.) I challenge anyone who claims 100% recognition rate to either not know what (s)he is talking about, concealing some relevant details, or not to know what a spam problem is. I've run some deluge of spam through the latest stable spamassassin (2.55) for the past few weeks, and it is obvious that some of the missed spams are very difficult to detect with any automated method, or are specifically crafted to score low on spamassassin. You would have that problem with any well-known spam filter, and the not well-known ones are probably not worth using. You also need to be careful with your regexp or else you end up running a DoS on your mail server, it's my guess that this does reduce the recognition rate. There are Nigerian spams which score very low on spamassassin (I've got at least one somewhere). Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is possibly list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
