Live spam-catching contest at CEAS

noodleburglar writes "The 2007 Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (CEAS) will feature a live spam-catching contest. Entrants will be treated to a torrent of spam and must use their spam filtering technique to filter out as much as possible, while also letting legitimate messages. My money's on Spam Assassin." This ought to be a sweeps week television spectacular.

CRM114

[sageFool]

http://crm114.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] using hyperspace! It's been working better than spam assassin for me.

Group spam detection

[Animats]

Gmail, like SpamCop, has a group spam filter system. It looks at mail sent to a large number of recipients. The defining characteristic of spam is that it's sent to a large number of recipients, after all. If you're in a position to watch the incoming mail of a few million mailboxes, detecting spam is easy.

Re:My money

[0100010001010011]

Set up a catchall on your domain. You'll start getting stuff through. Especially the images ones. Some of the newer "make it look like a real e-mail" gets through.

Everywebsite I have gets its own e-mail account, eg. [e-mail].
One day I started getting spam to [e-mail]. So I setup in dreamhost to bounce everything to that e-mail address.

Then I started getting flooded with:
[e-mail]
[e-mail]

Google has, thankfully, let me do delete of *[e-mail], but for a time I was still getting them.

Re:Curious:When urologists email each other...

[kebes]

Suffice it to say that a doctor is likely to write an email like:

"Ted, I just read the news about Viagra in the New England Journal of Medicine. Very interesting results, though the error bars are a bit large to draw any major conclusions just yet. What do you think?"

Whereas a doctor rarely writes email like:

"NoW ava ilable is generic V1AGRA at low price! Generic, quality, all low price now!"

The point is that modern spam filters don't just look for "bad words" but consider relative word frequencies, the sender and receiver fields, word correlations, formatting elements, URLs, etc. Spam filters in your email client will be trained against email you typically send/receive, and so can be even more precise. Spammers of course try to make their emails include words so that they end up looking like real email, but if the filter is good enough, then the only way to get past it is to send an email that now lacks those critical spam elements (like the link you're supposed to click to buy the generic drug or whatever)...

Flawed

[lazarus]

"This ought to be a sweeps week television spectacular."
This ought to be ignored as the contest is flawed.

"Ha ha, silly admin. My money's on greylisting."
They're sending a stream of spam from where? Sounds like a real mail server...

From TFA: "Live email stream, delivered by standard protocols (SMTP, IMAP, POP)"
[One wonders how else they would deliver e-mail if it was not from standard protocols. I also wonder how they plan on delivering e-mail using POP... The mind boggles...]

In any case if I read this correctly this effectively eliminates anti-spam technologies which work on the premise that the spam is coming from illegitimate mail servers. One of these techniques is greylisting. Meaning, greylisting will not work. So if I were you, I wouldn't put your money on it.

GENERAL JUNK E-MAIL FILTERING RANT (You've been warned): If you're using an anti-spam technique which takes more cpu cycles to execute than it takes for the spammer to send the damn spam in the first place, you've already lost this war. In other words, as long as it's costing you more than it is costing him/her you will always be on the losing end of the deal.

And I would like to add that despite my post above, I agree with you that greylisting and its derivatives when properly deployed are excellent techniques for eliminating UBE. But I think this contest is engineered to ignore that fact.