Bryan> I literally get so much spam now that I cannot even *think* about
Bryan> looking in the junk folder -- I just have to trust... the junk
Bryan> suspects is getting this way as well...
Hmmm... How large is your junk suspects folder that you can't at least skim
it?
Shifting gears a bit, I think it would be worthwhile for all organizations
to at least look at greylisting as a way to reduce the amount of spam
entering their networks. Take a look here:
http://www.greylisting.org/
I happen to use postgrey with postfix as my weapon of choice. On March 25th
I started using this setup. This graph shows the number of messages
SpamBayes has had to classify since early last November:
http://manatee.mojam.com/~skip/sb.png
Note the huge drop in mail it classified as spam after March 25th. By my
crude calculation I've seen a drop in spam reaching SpamBayes by a factor of
four to five, about 1540 per day over the first 20 days of the graph's
period and about 330 per day over the last 20 days. Note that these numbers
are for the email received by one person, not an entire organization.
Eliminating the high-scoring spam which is simply discarded (that scoring >=
0.80), I'm left with about 30 messages classified as spam per day that need
to be scanned and about twice as many unsures. Those numbers may just be
artifacts of the train-to-exhaustion regimen I use or misclassified mails in
my training database. At any rate, they are small enough for me to skim
quickly at various times during the day.
Anecdotally, SpamBayes seems to be doing a better job classifying the mail I
do receive (60 unsures per day notwithstanding). My theory is that
eliminating entire classes of spam (mostly that sent by virus-commandeered
Windows machines) probably reduces the variability in the spam that does get
past postfix, so spam is easier to properly classify.
I realize a postfix mail server is probably not in the cards for everyone.
If you're a Microsoft customer I suggest you start leaning on them to add
something similar to their SMTP server product.
--
Skip Montanaro
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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