Hello Adam, Tuesday, June 1, 2004, 9:10:18 PM, you wrote:
A> I am not using a recent TB version too much. But, it isn't clear, does A> it have a complete solution against spam on board? It seems like you A> have a couple menu entries. But you wonder, where is the intelligence? A> It's not fighting spam already. The Bat! doesn't fight spam. It provides an interface for other products to fight spam through itself. The Anti-Spam plugin interface effectively allows plugins to look at email as they arrive, and use whatever rules they like to determine whether or not they are spam. The plugin reports a score of "spamminess", and The Bat! then handles the spam according to the user's wishes (e.g. moves mail that scores over x to a folder, and deletes mail that scores over y.) A> If you get a message like: A> Cable_TV Filter Lets You Get It ALL_FOR_NOTHING, IF: b1hgq16776 A> Then I guess you can suggest that this is a spam message. And later, A> how is one to know if you get a message from a cable company, that it A> isn't a newsletter about cable TV? That's down to the plugin, not to The Bat! - you could write plugins to handle this differently. Spam can be detected in many ways. A common method I use on email servers I maintain is to reject mail that doesn't have a valid domain in the from address - much spam comes from "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" - a completely random domain string. That's a good sign of spam. The most common anti-spam plugin for The Bat! (BayesIt) primarily uses a statistical analysis of the email - it looks for words that are common to spam, but not to legitimate email. In your example, the words "all for nothing" are perhaps important - if you don't get legitimate emails regularly that contain them, then they'll get assigned a greater weight of spamminess. The actual spamminess score of the whole email is calculated by looking at how many words in the mail are common spam words, and how many aren't - notice how many spams are very short? They'll score highly. Whereas that legitimate email from a cable TV company will be long - it'll have lots of details, some boilerplate legal stuff, and so forth. So the email as a whole scores much lower. Over time, the filter learns what the spam you receive looks like, and how it differs statistically from the legitimate email you receive. A> Do anti-spam tools used in the Bat work with, or do they obsolesce A> other anti-spam applications? Not necessarily. You can use systems like POPFile with The Bat!, but personally I don't see much value in doing so. Filters that sit in front of mail clients (like POPFile) take longer to train and are much less likely to build up a good base of statistics that show what your legitimate email looks like, especially if you don't receive much legitimate email when compared with the volume of spam. -- Best regards, Philip mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Using The Bat! v2.10.03 on Windows 2000 5.0 Build 2195 Service Pack 4
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________________________________________________ Current version is 2.10.03 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
