Hello Thomas, On Thursday, August 29, 2002 at 6:09:07 AM you [TF] wrote (at least in part):
TF> Alas, with TB's filtering system, we don't need spam identifying or TF> scoring tools. I tend to disagree. I'm using two different Spam-tagging tools: At work SpamPal and at home SpamAssassin (I've set it up last weekend, to finally see what we were discussing about). They do _both_ do a good job in supporting me while recognizing Spam. Both only _tag_ possible spam, TB! filter it to a dedicated folder (to avoid loosing mails by a false positive). And both have capabilities TB! can't offer. Don't get me wrong: TB! does an excellent job in mail filtering, and I think you're right it can be set up to identify most of incoming spam by itself; but keeping spam filter in TB! up-to-date can be a hard job. Developing them in the first instance can even be harder if one don't want to filter too restrictive and end up in too many false positives. Using additional software as an _enhancement_ of TB!s filter capabilities makes a lot of sense to me; take SpamAssassin for example: It's filter rules are much more complex than TB! can do with it's current filter engine; additionally it does not tag any mail as spam that contains the words 'sex' and 'free offer' as spam. It gives 'points' to several criteria. If a threshold of points is reached, THAN the message is tagged. But it also has negative points: taken your engaged discussion some time ago if The Bat! X-Mailer header should be a criteria for recognizing spam: I've had a look at the rules: "X-Mailer: The Bat! ..." is in fact a criteria for _lowering_ points. I've added an additional rule for giving an exact hit of: X-Mailer: The Bat! (v1.52f) Business positive points and therefore _here_ normal TB! user get a 'bonus' while the string known to be misused triggers a hit. Another thing SpamAssassin is capable of is recognizing 'HTML only' mails; means mails w/o content type 'text/plain' which indicates with good chances this is spam, as a normal OE or any other MUA that sends HTML mails usual send content type 'multipart/alternative'. Then you could set it up to parse 'Received' lines and check found IPs against RBL for identifying mail that came through a known 'spam host'. Quite hard to do with TB!, isn't it? :-) So to sum up: as good as filter capabilities of The Bat! are: external spam recognizing tool, specialized to do exactly one thing: recognizing spam, are a good addition in 'fighting spam' :-) And tools like SpamAssassin that don't rely on _one_ criteria are IMNSHO the way to do it :-))) -- Regards Peter Palmreuther (The Bat! v1.62/Beta1 on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 1) Hartley's Second Law: Never sleep with anyone crazier than yourself. ________________________________________________ Current version is 1.61 | "Using TBUDL" information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
