SpamAssassin 3.0 Released 335
davemabe writes "At long last, SpamAssassin 3.0.0 has been released. I've been using the release candidates for a month or so, and the results have been far improved over previous versions. Its use of SURBL along with Bayes auto learning make it seem like this solution is the one to beat. It looks like they've introduced a new logo as well. Snazzy!"
SURBL (Score:5, Informative)
It makes it really hard for them unless they just register countless domains.
Excellent technology, and I will be upgrading to the newest stable.
Chris
Re:SURBL (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:SURBL (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:SURBL (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:SURBL (Score:2)
You'd be amazed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:SURBL (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:SURBL (Score:4, Insightful)
<rant>
You know, if we just dropped the whole notion of using HTML in e-mails, and only allowed plain text most of this would never have happened in the first place.
</rant>
Does it use IP's or URI's ? (Score:5, Insightful)
I would rather extract the domain, look up the IP, and check the IP.
That way the server will have to move to a new IP - not just get a new bogus domain name.
Yes, I know that servers many host many domains:
This will only increase pressure on the spamheaven server admins to get rid of the people who use spam to spamvertize their sites.
Re:Does it use IP's or URI's ? (Score:2, Interesting)
So, would either SA 3.0 take care of this naturally, or allow me to easily write a plugin to resolve the addresses in links and apply my own IP address based blacklist?
Re:Does it use IP's or URI's ? (Score:4, Informative)
Ewan
Re:Does it use IP's or URI's ? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Does it use IP's or URI's ? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Does it use IP's or URI's ? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Does it use IP's or URI's ? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Does it use IP's or URI's ? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.surbl.org/faq.html#numbered
Re:Does it use IP's or URI's ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Does it use IP's or URI's ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Extreme spamfighters don't care though. You're guilty by association in their eyes and deserve to feel the same wrath that the spammers do. It's so that you'll bitch to your provider and in turn your provider will shut down the spam site because all their other customers are complaining vs. some random guys on the Internet complaining they're receiving that URL in spam.
Re:Does it use IP's or URI's ? (Score:3, Interesting)
May fvorite was a Washington DC news company that had implemented extreme spamfighting measures. Since our outgoing mail server doesn't receive incoming mail, its not in the MX records. This guy was bouncing our mail because of that. God hopes that the next Deep throught doesn't try to contact his news organization...
Re:Does it use IP's or URI's ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is fine with me.
Re:Does it use IP's or URI's ? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Does it use IP's or URI's ? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're not blacklisting; you're marking as "more likely spam". In practice the damage will be minimal. First, legit email from the other 399 domains will in general be non-spam-like. The positive hit on the IP address won't be enough to push them over the edge. The penalties for being found in the SURBL at the moment are all relatively small, all less than 1 (5 points are needed in the default configuration to mark a message as spam). The only exception is data from the Spam Cop database, which is fairly small and more carefully vetted. If they broaden from hostnames to IPs, you might have to tweak the scores down, but that's it. Second, what's the realistic chance of your getting email containing a URL linking to that IP? There are millions of web sites. The Big Important Web Sites aren't on the sort of massive shared server you describe. The chances that you'll get an email mentioning one of those smaller sites is pretty small. There is a risk, but it's small enought that I won't lose any sleep over it.
Re:Does it use IP's or URI's ? (Score:4, Informative)
I wanted that a long time ago. At the time, I couldn't find a program written by anyone else, so I wrote my own. It works well for me and anyone who wants the script is free to use it. It is at my homepage [kainaw.com].
Re:Does it use IP's or URI's ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Your suggested technique would be exploited by script kiddies everywhere (who already have access to large zombie networks) to basically ban someone from the internet. What a fantastic idea.
Re:Does it use IP's or URI's ? (Score:4, Informative)
That won't help against "bulletproof hosting", commonly used by spammers, where a nameserver in a country like Russia or Poland resolves the name to one of thousands of zombie machines hosting the site.
The SURBL approach does.
Yes, I know that servers many host many domains: ... This will only increase pressure on the spamheaven server admins to get rid of the people who use spam to spamvertize their sites.
Spammers don't use $10/month shared virtual hosting for their websites.
Re:SURBL (Score:3, Funny)
From: Mom
Hi, honey, I just wanted to see how you were doing. We're doing great around here. Write back soon. I love you.
Do you yahoo? Enlarge your penis [penis-enlarge.com] today!
You never know I guess...
Re:SURBL (Score:2)
For those who may have forgotten (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the command to install/upgrade 3.0 via CPAN:
# perl -MCPAN -e shell;
cpan > install Mail::SpamAssassin
(many lines, type in the administrator's e-mail address, say no to network tests)
exit
#
Very difficult stuff.
Oh! Some link whoring as well:
SpamAssassin Milter for Sendmail [gnu.org] - Filters everyone without procmail
SpamAssassin Milter Quarantine [sourceforge.net] - Quarantines spam messages and sends summaries in digest for 1 or more times daily rather than simply delivering to the end user.
razor? (Score:2)
Re:razor? (Score:2)
Re:razor? (Score:2)
Re:For those who may have forgotten (Score:4, Informative)
Dave [runningland.com]
Re:SURBL (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:SURBL (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is fine. There are two defenses, both of which work now: 1. Javascript in a message is a big spam flag; legit mail almost never uses it. SpamAssassin and most other hybrid systems assign mail a score, more points means more likely to be spam. HTML typically adds a small penalty, javascript adds a bit penalty. Bayesian systems that see the Javascript will quickly learn to penalize any javascript tags. 2. The filter can filter based on what the user sees, not the raw feed. SpamAssassin already does this to catch people using HTML to try and break up words.
All in all, this isn't worrying to me at all.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Improved Performance? (Score:5, Interesting)
-- Performance is MUCH better than it used to be. It scans messages much faster than I've ever seen SA 2.x do, and doesn't hog my server's resources anymore.
-- THIS THING ROCKS. For almost two weeks after I installed it I kept instinctively sending myself test emails to make sure I hadn't broken my mail system, because my volume of incoming mail had reduced so drastically. I was used to getting at least a new spam every 2 minutes. After installing SA 3.0 I got one false negative in a 72 hour period. It is *that* good. To date I still have not recorded a single false positive. I really had to convince myself that this thing was real.
This spamfilter rocks. I'd award it product of the year if I could.
Re:Improved Performance? (Score:3, Interesting)
[...] and doesn't hog my server's resources anymore.
Got any numbers on memory use? I would love to run SA on my home server, but it has "only" got 80MB of RAM. I tried running 2.x, but it seriously brought the system to its knees (swapping)
I must say, Python might be a nice language and all, but as it's making inroads everywhere it's also wrecking havoc on ones ability to convert older hardware into a competent server. YMMV (mailman + bittorrent + (apache + exim + samba) and you're pretty much down to
Re:Improved Performance? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Improved Performance? (Score:2, Funny)
Plugin Architecture (Score:5, Interesting)
Version 3.0 will result in a proliferation of good third party plug-ins that are going to put SA into more direct competition with some of the commercial vendors out there.
actually i've always felt their name's not right (Score:5, Funny)
Sneaking into fortresses/castles, creeping up and then offing the bad guy, or else maybe using some nice long-distance sniper rifle to take out the bad guy, or maybe choice application of poisons at the right bottle of wine, etc.
This is not appropriate for *spam*, where we're talking about waves upon waves upon unending waves in what we would call a "target rich environment". Assassination? No, more like machine-gunning, or artillery, or, I dunno, nukes.
Assassination would take too long.
Re:actually i've always felt their name's not righ (Score:2)
Re:actually i've always felt their name's not righ (Score:2)
Better names? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, since it's capable of removing a certain caste of emails entirely how about SpamGenocide or SpamacialCleansing?
Perhaps we should identify it with (im)famous person(s) to drive up hits like SpamHitler, SpamNazi, or SpamlobodanMilosevic?
Maybe something that has an associated coolness factor, instead of being (almost) universaly hated, like Dr. Spamibal Lecter?
Well, there's still the problem of overwhelming evil there. It's not really evil, just heartless and calculating. Hmm, heartless, calculating, killer... I got it! How about SpamAssassin? Oh, wait...
Re:actually i've always felt their name's not righ (Score:3, Insightful)
anto-spam (Score:4, Informative)
Re:anto-spam (Score:5, Interesting)
Contrary to DSPAM author's claims, both it and and CRM-114 (another package which likes to self-hype) performed quite a bit worse than SpamAssassin.
Then again, I've heard people being happy with DSPAM that were not happy with SA.
Guess it depends on the mailfeed you get.
Re:anto-spam (Score:2)
Isn't a human 100% accurate by definition?
"I could have sworn I wanted to read that email, but I guess I was wrong."
Re:anto-spam (Score:3, Interesting)
SpamAssassin 2.x with well trained (>1 year of spam @ 100+ spams/day) Bayes:
~5% false negative (~95% spam filtering accuracy, 1 in 20 spams let through).
DSPAM with large training corpus (~10k spams from a honeypot) plus 6 weeks of real mail at same spam rate:
0.45% false negative (99.55% spam filtering accuracy, 1 in 222 spams let through).
I now publicise an inoculation honeypot address: yumyum@easyweb.co.uk for spammers to harvest, which adds super-strength training.
I'm very happy with my mov [easyweb.co.uk]
Release notes? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Release notes? (Score:5, Informative)
Buzzword use detection alert. (Score:3, Funny)
Thank you for your coordination,
the Buzzword Police.
Purple Bayes... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Purple Bayes... (Score:2)
Try CRM114 [sourceforge.net] My SA results weren't very good either, despite training it with a year's worth of both spam and non-spam, and two month of continuous re-training. CRM114 was easier to train even though its author recommends that you do NOT train it with your spam cache. Its accuracy was only about 50% at first, but within two weeks it was over 90. After about three months, I'd guess its accuracy is around 98% - not quite the 99.94
Re:Purple Bayes... (Score:2)
Re:Purple Bayes... (Score:2)
If you want, I have put one of my user's spambox [talkingtoad.com] into a tgz if you want to untarball it and then run
Chris
Re:Purple Bayes... (Score:2)
http://dave.clendenan.ca/SPAMBOX.gz
anyone else got spam to share?
ps: remember to sa-learn YOUR OWN non-spam messages to balance this...
Re:Purple Bayes... (Score:2)
According to it, "The bayesian classifier can only score new messages if it already has 200 known spams and 200 known hams."
Also, my code was wrong. It should be Chris
A spam arms race? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A spam arms race? (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, I'm using spamassassin on my server (and have been for the past 2 years). Unfiltered, I get around 200 spam per day. 1 or 2 get through.
It's been that way since the day I installed it. and it doesn't appear that the spammers are using any substantially "smarter methods"
Maybe it really is easier to write a filter than it is to write filter-proof spam.
Spam is a technical problem, not political (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:A spam arms race? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:A spam arms race? (Score:2)
Drug is a social problem so you respond with (more) laws and repressive action ?
I'm happy I don't live in the same world as you...
Wait...
Fuck, I do !
Answers to social problems are preventive action and removing the roots of the problem (if possible) not repressive laws that are just ignored by the real bad people.
Re:A spam arms race? (Score:2)
Like something that has been posted to the internet, legislating the internet is alot like cleaning pee from the swimming pool. And spammers are like five dozen kids in the swimming pool, half of them trying to see if they can get away with peeing in it.
New logo ... (Score:5, Interesting)
New logo (Score:2, Funny)
Perhaps a good "thwooop!" sound effect would go well with it too.
Seriously: I really like that logo. (Score:2)
Performance (Score:4, Interesting)
It would be nice if it could be implemented now as I personally receive about 1000 spam messages a week.
Re:Performance (Score:2)
That's in their FAQ [apache.org].
Re:Performance (Score:2)
Re:Performance (Score:2)
Re:Performance (Score:3, Informative)
We have 3 linux dual-processor mail servers, and have basically maxed them out with memory so that we can use ramdisks for Mimedefang processing. CPU Utilization is currently <10%.
Some stats from yesterday:
Your ISP sucks then. :P (Score:4, Informative)
Your ISP just didn't want to take any time to actually learn about it.
3.0 New Features (Score:5, Informative)
- SpamAssassin is now part of the Apache Software Foundation and has an
improved software license, the 2.0 version of the Apache License.
- SpamAssassin now includes support for SPF (the Sender Policy
Framework, http://spf.pobox.com/).
- Web site links contained in the message are checked against SURBL and
SBL. SURBL and SBL track sites that advertise with spam, known spam
sources, and spam services.
- The new 3.0 architecture allows third-parties to easily add plugin
modules.
- There is now SQL database support for both the Bayes and
auto-whitelist modules, allowing more large sites to easily deploy
SpamAssassin.
- A more accurate simulation of email client handling of MIME and HTML
improves our accuracy. In addition, there is better detection and
handling of spammer techniques that try to trick anti-spam software.
Important installation notes:
- The SpamAssassin 2.6x release series was the last set of releases to
officially support perl versions earlier than perl 5.6.1. If you are
using an earlier version of perl, you will need to upgrade before you
can use the 3.0.0 version of SpamAssassin.
- SpamAssassin 3.0.0 has a significantly different API (Application
Program Interface) from the 2.x series of code. This means that if
you use SpamAssassin through a third-party utility (milter, etc,) you
need to make sure you have an updated version which supports 3.0.0.
- The --auto-whitelist and -a options for "spamd" and "spamassassin" to
turn on the auto-whitelist have been removed and replaced by the
"use_auto_whitelist" configuration option which is also now turned on
by default.
- The "rewrite_subject" and "subject_tag" configuration options were
deprecated and are now removed. Instead, using "rewrite_header Subject
[your desired setting]". e.g.
rewrite_subject 1
subject_tag ****SPAM(_SCORE_)****
becomes
rewrite_header Subject ****SPAM(_SCORE_)****
- The Bayesian storage modules have been completely re-written and now
include Berkeley DB (DBM) storage as well as SQL based storage (see
sql/README.bayes for more information). In addition, a new format has
been introduced for the bayes database that stores tokens in fixed
length hashes. All DBM databases should be automatically converted to
this new format the first time they are opened for write. You can
manually perform the upgrade by running "sa-learn --sync" from the
command line.
The "sa-learn --rebuild" command has been deprecated; please use
"sa-learn --sync" instead. The --rebuild option will remain
temporarily for backwards compatibility.
- "spamd" now has a default max-children setting of 5; no more than 5
child scanner processes will be run in parallel. Previously, there
was no default limit unless you specified the "-m" switch when
starting spamd.
- If you are using a UNIX machine with all database files on local
disks, and no sharing of those databases across NFS filesystems, you
can use a more efficient, but non-NFS-safe, locking mechanism. Do
this by adding the line "lock_method flock" to the
you're not using NFS, as it is much faster than the NFS-safe locker.
- Please note that the use of the following command line parameters for
spamassassin and spamd have been deprecated and are now removed. If
you currently use these flags, please remove them:
in the 2.6x series: --add-from, --pipe, -F, -P, --stop-at-threshold, -S
in the 3.0.x series: --auto-whitelist, -a
- The following flags are de
Curse you ISP! (Score:2, Insightful)
Sigh. Now I have to fight with my ISP to get a semimodern version of Perl installed.
Re:Curse you ISP! (Score:2)
# perl -MCPAN -e shell;
cpan > install Mail::SpamAssassin
Tell them to have it fulfill prerequisites. What will happen along the way is the CPAN will build the latest Perl in order to make 3.0 build nicely.
Sure, it's devious and underhanded, but darn it...it works.
Re:Curse you ISP! (Score:2)
Damn... (Score:2, Interesting)
In fact, I thought their logo contest rules suggested that they would prefer the new one to contain those guys still, in some way or another.
fillters vs. stallers (Score:4, Insightful)
what we need is not spam filters but spam stallers.
With spam filters your just precipitating in a arms race.
The spammers will send more and more spam
and your spam filters will use more and more
of your processor time to filter the spam.
It is a uphill battle against the spammer.
With spam stallers like sa-exim and tarproxy
your are stalling the spammers smtp connection
and the effect is that the spammer can't send
as much spam or that they drop you email from there email database.
Re:fillters vs. stallers (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:fillters vs. stallers (Score:3, Insightful)
True, but the purpose of a spam filter is to only let legitimate email through. If that encourages spammers to start writing legitimate emails, great! You might argue that they are writing legitimate looking emails, but SpamAssassin has always been 1 step ahead of them.
New logo. (Score:4, Funny)
still waiting for spammerassassin (Score:5, Funny)
Re:still waiting for spammerassassin (Score:5, Funny)
The spammerassassin team is active, but on my legal advice they are not documenting their work: it could, technically, be argued to be murder.
Re:still waiting for spammerassassin (Score:3, Insightful)
from a legal dictionary [law.com].
murder
n. the killing of a human being by a sane person, with intent, malice aforethought (prior intention to kill the particular victim or anyone who gets in the way) and with no legal excuse or authority...
No worries, spammers don't qualify as human.
McAfee SpamKiller based on SpamAssassin no good (Score:4, Informative)
McAfee has a product for Exchange servers that is based on Spam Assassin called Spam Killer. I found out about it from the Spam Assassin site when I was looking for a windows version. Spam Killer isnt free yet its not as expensive as some of the other solutions out there.
The major problem I've been having with it is it creating zero byte emails which cannot be downloaded via pop3. When a user gets 30 messages, and message 10 is a zero byte email the client will constantly download the first 10 over and over, creating duplicates, until the user logs into outlook web access (webmail) and deletes the zero byte message. This doesnt happen to the MAPI users but we have quite a few POP3 users.
The support people are useless, I'm about to try out Microsoft Intelligent Message Filter for exchange, and hopefully with some good RBLs it should be ok.
Great Book on it (Score:3, Interesting)
The sections on rules are extremely nice, and I found them pretty informative as to how the software works underneath. It covers version 3, too, so it's damned timely.
-Erwos
Antispam Gateway Distribution? (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems like there are linux distributions for just about anything you might want: routers, pvrs, etc. Are there any linux distributions designed to be a mail anti-spam/anti-virus (or just anti=spam) gateway?
The reason I think this would be cool is because configuring mail apps on linux can be hard and because this would be a great linux foot-in-the-door distribution for Exchange admins who didn't want to pay thousands of dollars for antispam gateways.
Re:Antispam Gateway Distribution? (Score:3, Informative)
An invitation to fellow spam-fighters (Score:3, Interesting)
That's the point at which we become interested in SpamAssassin users joining WPBL [pc9.org], an automated spam reporting system. Powered by scripts living in procmail and cron, participating systems send WPBL lists of IP addresses sending spam and ham. The central server crunches this data hourly to produce a list [rsync://rsync.pc9.org/wpbl/wpbl-blocks.cidr] of blocked IP addresses that are spam sources.
If your site uses SA and you have verified your spam detection accuracy as nearly-perfect, you might be interested in contributing your spam/ham sighting stats to WPBL. The resulting block list can be used by anyone (and is used by some ISPs for spam scoring). The way I think of it is, after you've taken care of the spam problem at your site why not help tell the rest of the world where spam is coming from.
TMDA (Score:3, Informative)
What I use now (alongside SpamAssassin) is TMDA [tmda.net]. This is basically an "approval queue" for messages. If someone not in your approved list send you mail, they get a reply telling them they need to send mail to a specificly generated address in order to allow the mail to pass through to me. Eventually mails that don't get approved time-out and get added to a blacklist for the future. I also quickly review the queued items every morning in case someone didn't see the approval mail (it has a tool that allows you to easily peruse the list with just subject and sender info). So far I've gotten NO spam through this method -- NONE. I used to get hundreds a day, and now I have a spam-free INBOX because of TMDA.
While I highly recommend using TMDA, it may not be for people running businesses or waiting for mail from clients. The auto-reply message can perhaps strike some as inconvenient, even though they only have to do it once (once they've sent mail to the approval address, they're added to the whitelist for all future mails). So far spammers haven't found a way around TMDA it seems...so far.
Installing on Windows....you're kidding, right? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm probably going to flamed for this, but that install process is ridiculous. I'm not even close to being a newbie, but there's no way I'd go through that much hassle to install a spamblocker compared to something like SpamBayes that does a standard windows install and hooks right into Outlook. Does anyone thing that these things are reasonable?
1. I'm supposed to extract it to the root of my drive. Sorry, my root is sacrosanct. If the
2. I've got to install Perl modules? And it doesn't work with certain versions of Perl? The install should include whatever it needs to run. Don't make me track down some particular version of outside software.
3. I've got to generate a batch file and run it to generate the documentation? Why not just include the generated documentation?
4. Step 10 of the install FAQ mentions a D drive. I don't have a D drive. Does SpamAssassin really require TWO drives to run/test properly?
5. The whole install process includes 13 steps, some of which are fairly complicated.
This is one of the reasons why the whole open-source initiative has such a bad, pointy-headed reputation. Where is the focus on usability and user-friendliness? I often get the impression that it's "not cool" to actually put time and energy into making your software anything other that esoteric in its usage. I realy would like to try SpamAssassin, but dealing with the minor annoyances of SpamBayes for the next six months is clearly less work than installing SpamAssassin today. Why doesn't that bother anyone?
I'm probably going get either flamed or ignored for this post, but I would appreciate a reasonable response if there is one. We'll see I guess.
Re:Installing on Windows....you're kidding, right? (Score:3, Informative)
The Win32 stuff is provided as a courtesy. I don't think they really expect anyone to use it, since it is so much easier to install on *nix.
Re:Installing on Windows....you're kidding, right? (Score:4, Informative)
Your points...
1. Extract it where ever you want.
2. So? PPM and CPAN are simple.
3. or you could use the docs on the web site you were looking at.
4. Step 10 does *not* require a D drive, the -D is for Debug mode. It spits out everything that SpamAssassin is doing, i.e. what config files, what db's what tests are being run. Actually quite usefull.
5.
Re:Installing on Windows....you're kidding, right? (Score:4, Informative)
SpamAssassin was written in Perl on Unix and Gnu/Linux, for use in high volume server environments. The installation for an ISP or for anyone running a *nix mail server is a piece of cake. Their users get their mail filtered without having to install anything on their own PCs.
The fact that it works on Windows at all is a bonus. It is an open source project. Would anyone like to volunteer to help with the next steps of getting the server daemon, spamd, working properly in Windows as a service; writing or adapting an existing mail proxy that would integrate SpamAssassin with mail clients such as Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail, Eudora, Outlook Express; packaging it up in a standard Windows install package?
Addressing the 5 points in the parent post:
1. Nothing has to go in the root directory. The instructions show an example of Perl having been installed in C:\perl and configuration going in directories underneath a C:\etc\mail directory.
2. Yes you have to install Perl. And a recent enough version that doesn't have certain bugs. And the required modules. SpamAssassin was written in Perl, which makes it useful on systems that have Perl, such as most Unix and GNU/Linux systems. If you install Perl and the modules on your Windows system then you have a system that meets the minimum requirements. If you have a Palm Pilot or or an Xbox or Windows without Perl then your system does not meet the minimum requirements and you are not going to even try to run SpamAssassin on it. In that case install SpamBayes, or get an ISP who uses SpamAssassin for your mail, or any of many other alternatives.
3. Making the doc files is easier in *nix. I'll file a request for enhancement suggesting that generating the HTML be made part of the Makefile and that it be made to work under Windows. The doc files are generated from the sources as part of the build, so they are not included in a source distribution, which is what we are talking about here. If someone built a binary distribution they would include the doc files.
4. That -D command line option stands for Debug, not D drive
5. The whole install proces consists of 13 steps, some of which are things like "download SpamAssassin", some of which are "if you are installing the old version 2.6x do this extra step", and some of which have to do with getting the required Perl and Perl modules. The actual installation pretty much happens in three lines of step 7. It really is quite easy for a build and installation starting from source files. A binary installation package would be a lot easier. Does anyone know how to package perl plus modules plus a built SpamAssassin into a Windows install package? If you do, feel free to volunteer.
The focus on usability and user friendliness is where it should be in this particular project, on the sysadmin who installs SpamAssassin on a server and on their end users who don't have to install anything at all.
If you have the ideas and the expertise to also make SpamAssassin more useful and friendly to the end user owner of a PC running Windows, please volunteer to help.
Re:Artificial intelligence was born... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Artificial intelligence was born... (Score:5, Interesting)
Artificial intelligence was born... Filtering spam.
In Greg Egan's _Permutation City_, spam filters and spam become ever more intelligent. Your spam filter runs the interactive video mail in a sandbox trying to detect whether it's spam, the spam tries to detect that it is in a sandbox or that it is talking to an AI construct, so that it can hide its commercial intent. Your filter tries to mimic you (and you review its reactions now and then, try to get its facial expressions ever more like yours, etc), the spammers try to get more information about you so they can try to fool your filter by making the spam look like on of your friends, etc.
This is an obvious arms race and in that book, AI and uploaded individuals etc exist - but the trick is to make your AI spam filters as good as possible without making them actually self-conscious, since using self-conscious AI software for spam filtering would be torture.
I rather liked that idea.
Anyone else having installation problems? (Score:2)
Re:Artificial intelligence was born... (Score:2)
Re:CRM114? (Score:2)
CRM114's author recommends against training it with a history of spam, and instead recommends train-on-error only. This means that, at first, you get a LOT of errors, both false positives and negatives, but the accuracy improves very very quic