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Reviewing Anti-Spam Offerings 311

Posted by CmdrTaco from the eggs-bacon-sausage-and dept.
Joel Snyder writes "Just finished looking into the innards of 40+ anti-spam products at Network World. The biggest, ugliest, and most comprehensive look at this market that's ever been done. Conclusions: lots of great products to choose from at the top (a dozen or more); a few stinkers in the bunch; and it's basically impossible to review Spam Assassin, which is unfortunate."
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Reviewing Anti-Spam Offerings More

Reviewing Anti-Spam Offerings

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  • Objective (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    From deep within the article:
    "Although these tests were conducted with the assistance of Borderware, we where careful to ensure results where fair and objective."

    So, that would be why borderware's product got the #1 position?

    • Re:Objective (Score:2, Informative)

      by joel_snyder ( 561706 )
      > From deep within the article:
      >"Although these tests were conducted with the
      > assistance of Borderware, we where careful to
      > ensure results where fair and objective."

      So deep that... they must be in some other article. I don't know where you cut-and-pasted that out of, but it sure wasn't the article referenced in this post.

    • Re:Objective (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I posted the parent. The quote is entirely contrived, and is not part of the article. You should mod it down now.

      Conclusion: Mods don't check facts - if you want excellent karma post completely false information hinting at a evil corporate/government conspiracy.

    • Re:Objective (Score:3, Insightful)

      by CoffeeJedi ( 90936 )
      what they REALLY say about bias in their report:

      IronPort Systems, a messaging appliance vendor, was asked not to participate in the test because Opus One has an existing consulting contract with this company - including them in the test would have created a conflict of interest.

  • Thunderbird (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ack154 ( 591432 ) *
    I find that Mozilla's Thunderbird has excellent anti-spam control. That's just from my own "testing" though...
    • MOD PARENT UP!

      Thunderbird's spam filtering really is amazing. Spend 2 weeks 'training' it with what is spam and what is not, and then tell it to automatically move spam to the junk folder. I have 150 junk mails from the past week -- never saw any of them in my inbox and not one is a false positive.

    • Re:Thunderbird (Score:3, Interesting)

      by casuist99 ( 263701 )
      I certainly do get a lot of false positives with thunderbird's spam-controls, and would really like an interface through which I can view the filtering logs (words, frequency, etc) that thunderbird must be creating.

      A reporting feature (even if thunderbird just exports a database csv file) would provide more value to me. I'd also like to be able to transfer my thunderbird spam filtering profile to new installations (after reformatting, for example).

      A lot of other packages (e.g. spamassassin) support some

      • Re:Thunderbird (Score:3, Informative)

        by ack154 ( 591432 ) *
        I don't think I've seen any false-positives since about 0.7 - but it does miss some emails now and then, so it's not really 100% success rate, but really, what is?

        But I do see your point... however, you also have to understand that with Thunderbird, you're not really running a separate application to filter your spam (or running anything on your server for it) - this is just a free email client that does it's own filtering.

        Though as I said, I'm quite satisfied. And of course, your mileage may vary.

    • Re:Thunderbird (Score:3, Informative)

      by fireduck ( 197000 )
      Thunderbird's anti-spam is nice, but I wouldn't call it excellent, at least from my experience. I've been using the junk mail feature since 0.7 or thereabouts, on a mail account that gets anywhere from 10 to 30 messages a day, 90% of which are spam. When I recently downloaded 300 or so messages, I still had 25 junk mails that it didn't flag. After several months of training, I'd think it should be more effective than that.
      • 300 messages, of which 90% are spam (according to your own figures). That means 270 total spam messages. It missed 25, which is
        25/270 = 9.25% of your spam missed.

        So, it eliminates nearly 91% of your spam, and you don't think that's great? I've seen commercial programs that don't work that well. You've also got to consider that this is just a bunch of rules that decide based on a few criteria that a message may or may not be spam. I'd much rather a few false negatives than a single false positive, so 9

  • In-line SPAM filtering - never hits your server (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dj42 ( 765300 ) * on Monday December 20, 2004 @01:46PM (#11138868) Journal
    Mine isn't in the list.... http://www.mxlogic.com

    I have said it before on here, but I use Mx-logic.com to filter e-mail before it even gets to my mail server (as their filtering is in-line). They run multiple concurrent virus scanners, and you can set all policies related to attachments, sizes, virus scanning, quarantines, SPAM (deny, accept, etc, for different "levels" of probability).

    It's really efficient. I haven't gotten a virus in any attachments and maybe just 2-3 SPAM messages / month (down from 100+ / day). It also does cool stuff like remove the imbedded tracking images from SPAM HTML messages (should one get through), etc. No, I don't work for them. I used to quarantine messages and review it weekly (that were medium / high probability spam), now I trust their service so much I just deny receipt to my mail server of any Medium+ probability SPAM
    • ...to filter e-mail before it even gets to my mail server (as their filtering is in-line).

      "In-line"? That doesn't really make any sense. Sounds like what you're doing is just sending all of your e-mail through someone else's server before it goes to your server. That might be an okay solution for some, but it's not like it's really anything special -- you can easily set that up yourself if you like using another server under your own control.
      • http://www.mxlogic.com/technology/ "In-line Message Streaming MX Logic's service architecture creates a proxy gateway for inbound email to the enterprise or destination mail host. The service never actually acknowledges receipt of an email message. Instead, MX Logic accepts the inbound email traffic with the Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP) and immediately opens a connection to the destination recipient email server. Messages are then passed through MX Logic's preprocessing filtering layers as they ar

        • Only problem with in-line scanning is the time/resource it takes to do it.

          While great for low-volume mail servers, you really need a beefy box to enable you to have enough MTA threads for handling the initial SMTP communication, threads for doing the virus scanning/spam filtering, and CPU to do it in the time allowed by the SMTP standard (I *think* it is 180 seconds... probably enough time).

          I don't know if there's an advantage to not accepting virus-laden mail as one can biff it "off line" without inv
    • MX Logic participated last year, but didn't get into the "final fab five" or whatever it was. I am not sure why they didn't participate this year. You'd have to ask them.
    • Things I've learned about outsourcing spam filtering...

      Number 1 - Too many missed messages. I've been adding domains to the block list for a year now. I still get more spam messages.

      Number 2 - Poor configuration options. The only things I can change is the "aggressiveness" in 4 or 5 catagories (bulk email, porn, attachments, etc), or adding addresses/domains to a white/blacklist. Spam Assassin lets me change scores for different things, which is very nice.

      Number 3 - Dependance on offsite server. Gen

  • That is unfortunate (Score:5, Funny)

    by suso ( 153703 ) on Monday December 20, 2004 @01:48PM (#11138899) Journal
    I just upgraded my server to the latest version 3.0.1 of spamassassin and the difference is amazing. I haven't had one piece of spam get through to my inbox today. And from what I can tell, there are no false positives yet. Unless you think that Darcy really wants me to come over and check out her new webcam.

  • SpamAssassin? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ajs ( 35943 ) <[ajs] [at] [ajs.com]> on Monday December 20, 2004 @01:49PM (#11138902) Homepage Journal
    They say, "Although a few well-meaning souls volunteered to be the contacts for SpamAssassin, when it came time to test no one would step up to the plate and represent the product at a level that would make it competitive to the other enterprise-focused vendors."

    I can only wonder what it was that they asked and who they asked. There are several companies that provide products based on SA, and the developers are very responsive.

    I'll have to look in more depth later and see if any of the products they reviewed were SA-based.

    Still, a review that does not cover common open source implementations such as DSPAM and SA is not a review that I would put much stake in.
    • I'll have to look in more depth later and see if any of the products they reviewed were SA-based.

      From what I gather, there were. They're saying they couldn't review SpamAssassin as such because you're dealing with a community and not a company, but they do have SpamAssassin based products.

    • Enterprise support (Score:4, Insightful)

      by sterno ( 16320 ) on Monday December 20, 2004 @02:02PM (#11139033) Homepage
      If you're going to review things for the enterprise, then you need to keep in mind the requirements of an enterprise. Very few large businesses are willing to trust a product that doesn't have some sort of obvious support structure behind it. If the reviewer could not find a solid support structure for it, then it isn't suitable as an enterprise spam solution.
      • Very few large businesses are willing to trust a product that doesn't have some sort of obvious support structure behind it.

        Translation: Someone else to blame.

        • That's exactly right. What's your point? "Blame" is just the flip side of "accountability."

          Why is that a problem? People who know what they are responsible for are more likely to do a good job.
          • If someone is planning to deploy an open source tool or any tool for that matter, they should know enough about to be able to help themselves. Having another entity to be 'responsible' harbours a false sense of security. Depending on another software company, should something go wrong, is a serous error in management. Have you read EULAs? They state expicitly that the software is supplied as is and that the vendor will not be responsible for data or revenue loss. Should you have a support contract with
      • "Very few large businesses are willing to trust a product that doesn't have some sort of obvious support structure behind it"

        Red Hat Enterprise Linux is specifically geared to this market (to the exclusion of smaller business customers, who are generally priced out of Red Hat's support pricing), and ships with SA as a supported piece of the OS.

        Next concern?

      • Barracuda (Score:3, Interesting)

        by charnov ( 183495 )
        Actually, the #1 selling enterprise anti-spam device (the Barracuda line) is a SpamAssassing core device.
      • No one has an IT department willing to support it? Our university [muohio.edu] recently implemented SpamAssassin for the 20k+ email accounts. I'm sure there are corporations out there of our size that have a larger IT budget than us. Although Miami tends to lean towards open source more often than not (SquirrelMail, SpamAssassin, PHP, etc.). I'm glad they're spending money on enhancing existing projects than giving it to some company because they have a customer support line.

    • Re:SpamAssassin? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      From TFA:
      "However, two commercial vendors, Roaring Penguin (on Unix) and NoSpamToday! (on Windows) sent products that exposed their SpamAssassin cores. Although neither met our false-positive threshold for inclusion in the top 12 finalists (probably because of difficulty of tuning Bayesian engines and neural networks in a test lab setting), we were very pleased to have them participate in the project."

      Still, a poster that does not RTFA before making such a comment is not a poster I would put much stake i

    • Where's SpamAssassin? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      FROM TFA:

      The short answer is that no one submitted it, but of course there's more to it than that. This year we reached out to the SpamAssassin community and asked them to participate. Although a few well-meaning souls volunteered to be the contacts for SpamAssassin, when it came time to test no one would step up to the plate and represent the product at a level that would make it competitive to the other enterprise-focused vendors.

      Interest in SpamAssassin is understandable. In the small-business market,
  • Using Thunderbird greatly cuts down on the amount of spam you see in the inbox. After using for only about a month, 90% of spam was automatically deposited in the "junk mail" folder. Surely this isn't as good as a paid spam-prevention service, but its free :)

    • Re:Thunderbird very good (Score:2, Insightful)

      by g0dz ( 705638 )
      today i check my inbox and there was no new messages. the junk folder got 108 new messages i check one by one and thunderbird got it right, all spam. thunderbird really make my day.
    • Using Thunderbird greatly cuts down on the amount of spam you see in the inbox.

      ...but does nothing at all to reduce an ISP's bandwidth, storage, and tech support costs. As such, "just convert everyone to Thunderbird" is more or less useless as a first-line response against spam.

      The real payoff is in blocking spam before it ever gets into the system. This is where greylisting, RHSBLs, and server-side spam filtering can save a bundle of cash, both in hardware and reduced administration time.

      Disclaimer

  • Avoiding spam (Score:2, Informative)

    by narcolept ( 741693 )
    Maybe it's just me and I'm one of the few lucky people in the world, but out of 5 regular email addresses that I use on a daily basis, I rarely if ever recieve spam, and during the workday, watching mailserver logs, the only people in my company getting silly amounts of spam (to me, one or two messages a day is just a minor annoyance) are people who click every popup and put their email addresses in every form available. If it wasn't for the built in spam filtering of Kerio Mail server, which is what we use

    • Re:Avoiding spam (Score:5, Informative)

      by Yaztromo ( 655250 ) on Monday December 20, 2004 @02:21PM (#11139220) Homepage Journal
      Maybe it's just me and I'm one of the few lucky people in the world, but out of 5 regular email addresses that I use on a daily basis, I rarely if ever recieve spam, and during the workday, watching mailserver logs, the only people in my company getting silly amounts of spam (to me, one or two messages a day is just a minor annoyance) are people who click every popup and put their email addresses in every form available.

      There are many ways in which spammers harvest and generate spam messages, and not all of them require entering your e-mail address into web forms.

      I have a number of e-mail addresses, some of which date back to the early 90's and use daily, and others which are more recent and which I've never used at all.

      My oldest e-mail address was my primary e-mail adddress for newsgroup postings for many, many years. I haven't given or used that address in roughly 2 years now (as I'm using a different address that forwards to this old mailbox), and yet I still get dozens of spam messages being sent to this address daily (all of which are thankfully auttomatically filtered).

      On the other end of the spectrum is my Gmail account. I have never used this account for anything at all. I've never sent an e-mail from it, or used it to register for anything. And yet it too receives spam (all of which Google also does a good job of filtering automatically). An old e-mail account I got from my ISP when I signed up for my first cable modem was similar -- I already had a mailbox and never used that account. I never even bothered _checking_ it, until one day nearly a year later out of curiousity to see how many spam messages it may have received -- only to find the mailbox was filled with hundreds of spam messages.

      I often see messages where the list of recipients was obviously generated by attaching a list of user names to each entry in a list of domains and then sending the results. And who knows how many Windows e-mail worms out there are sending users address book entries back to spammers.

      Best practices can reduce your spam load from certain vectors, but not all of them, making some form of filtering good policy. When even unused mailboxes are getting clogged with spam, however, you know that best practices alone just aren't enough.

      Yaz.

  • Spamassassin (Score:5, Interesting)

    by confusion ( 14388 ) on Monday December 20, 2004 @01:52PM (#11138929) Homepage
    All-in-all, they didn't blast spamassassin as hard as I thought they were going to. It was sad to see that they didn't think they could get anyone to help them review SA, and it was sadder that they got a lot of the facts wrong about SA, like that it is built around a bayes database.

    The mere appearance of SA, though, is impressive because those trade rags rarely include anything open source (partly due to marketing opportunity for commercial, paying companies).

    Jerry http://www.syslog.org/ [syslog.org]

  • The Best Defense... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TrollBridge ( 550878 ) on Monday December 20, 2004 @01:52PM (#11138932) Homepage Journal
    ...is to treat your e-mail address like you treat other personal, abusable personal information.

    Do what I do: create a Yahoo (or some other free e-mail) account and use that address for all questionable forms you fill out.

    I've had the same address now for almost three years now and receive about five spams per week, at most.
    • Thats great advice...but for a lot of people the cat is out of the bag. I participated in discussion lists 5 years ago when spam wasn't on the radar... now those lists are open, my permanant email address is having the *CRAP* spammed out of it, and theres simply nothing I can do about it.

      Also, it only takes one unscrupulious company to ruin your email address forever. I get 50 spams a day that use my *FULL* name and address on a private email i have never posted.

    • Likely because you have a tough email address to "guess." Your suggestion does not apply if you have an email address like {CommonWord}@gmail.com. You will get spammed a good amount, as I do, even if you are CAREFUL with your email address.

    • Re:The Best Defense... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Tenebrious1 ( 530949 ) on Monday December 20, 2004 @02:32PM (#11139345) Homepage
      ...is to treat your e-mail address like you treat other personal, abusable personal information.
      Do what I do: create a Yahoo (or some other free e-mail) account and use that address for all questionable forms you fill out.
      I've had the same address now for almost three years now and receive about five spams per week, at most.

       Maybe that works well on a personal level, it's what I suggest to my friends. However, on a professional level, it doesn't work. You need to give your address out to people, you need them to be able to contact you. That's the nature of doing business, and being careful who you give it to only goes so far.

      All it takes is for one person who has your address to be careless and have their address book harvested by a worm. That may be beyond their control, maybe their IT department is clueless. Maybe they use your address on a webform to send you "info" or a "greeting card".

      That's why spam filters are necessary, some of us cannot work without having our email addresses out in the real world.

    • Do what I do ....

      and also not do the things you don't do:

      1. Answer questions, comments, feedback from customers
      2. Publish any public writing and accept comments from your readers
      3. Participate in public forums (like this one) and provide a reliable way for anyone interested to contact you

      Sure, the disposable address idea works great if you only use email for personal conversation exclusively with a small group of people you already know, and as a consumer.

      But if you want to publish anything, participate p

  • Funny how when you click the link to go to the article, the popup invites you to register for their spam^H^H^H^H newsletter. :)
  • What about built in spam blocking like that in yahoo, MSN, gmail mail as well in Outlook and other mail apps?
  • It doesn't include GFI Mail Essentials. I would like to have seen how that stood up to the competition.

    On a side note I have started using SpamBayes-Experimental on my outlook box and it is working well so far.

    • Re:Too bad (Score:3, Informative)

      by joel_snyder ( 561706 )
      GFI got a horrible review last year. The product they submitted was a pure 'word checker' (i.e., if you've got Viagra anywhere, you're spam) and so their false positive rate went through the roof. They also had some horrible heuristics, such as "if you're not on the "to:" line, it must be spam." My experience is that it was architected for a small office where you can tune it out the wazoo. They have since (I have heard) fixed their product, but they were so heavily burned by last year that they didn't

  • Just regurgitating marketing numbers (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 20, 2004 @01:59PM (#11139007)
    The buying guide is useful just for putting all the contenders together. But don't believe the claims until you test them. Barracuda, for example, touts the capability of millions of messages a day, but we are sending our second test unit back because it just can't handle a modest load of real world mail. Their 600, for example, claims it can process "25 million messages per day" but that assumes it is rejecting 95% of the mail -- that's nowhere in their fine print.
    • The buyer's guide definitely is just pure marketing numbers. The article gives more realistic performance numbers, and that exposes some of what you're bringing up in the text. I found exactly what you're reporting (and mention it as an issue): vendors advertise based on 'oh, yeah, we throw out 50% of the mail using RBL-type technology...' kinds of things. It's broadly dishonest, which is why the performance numbers in the article are so very important to revealing 'worst case' scenarios.
    • Their 600, for example, claims it can process "25 million messages per day" but that assumes it is rejecting 95% of the mail

      Out of curiousity, what's your mail volume and what percentage of that is legit?

  • Spam Solution (Score:3, Informative)

    by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Monday December 20, 2004 @02:07PM (#11139076) Journal
    Easy. A Postfix server running Postgrey and Anvil. Before mail ever hits a mailbox most spam (and a lot of viruses too) are weeded out. It can protect against distributed dictionary attacks.
    • "Easy. A Postfix server running Postgrey and Anvil."

      Ahh, greylisting. All the convenience of deleting mail indiscriminately, with none of the guilt...

  • MessageLabs (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tgignac ( 801368 ) on Monday December 20, 2004 @02:07PM (#11139078)
    This is a spam filtering service that I use, In 52 weeks 22,624 spam messages out of 93,714 have been blocked before entering my users inbox. The nice thing about this service for us is our IT dept is very under-staffed and makes it useful to have someone else worry about it. The do our anti-virus scanning as well and am proud to report that they have stopped all 5213 infected messages before even touching my server. Very worth while service if you are in a under-staffed situation like I am.

  • Why block spam? (Score:4, Funny)

    by IHateSlashDot ( 823890 ) on Monday December 20, 2004 @02:08PM (#11139091)
    If you block spam you'll never increase the size of your penis.
  • Seems like a lot of decent-sized players were left out... Ie - where is SpamKiller (client-side), SpamBully or SpamButcher?

    "We invited every anti-spam vendor in our online Buyer's Guide to participate"

    And what is there "online Buyer's Guide"? - a pay for inclusion directory!

    Between that and their #1 choice helping them with the review process - I have serious questions as to the value of this report

    . Accurately simulating a bunch of different anti-spam systems all getting the same e-mail is a bit of

  • bspam also excellent (Score:3, Informative)

    by brw12 ( 763380 ) <brw12 AT columbia DOT edu> on Monday December 20, 2004 @02:14PM (#11139142)
    Though it's a small project, bspam [sourceforge.net] is an excellent Bayesian filter for *nix... I tried bogofilter and some others but nothing jived with my qmail/procmail/pine setup as nicely as bspam.

  • Reject on SMTP. (Score:3, Informative)

    by eddy ( 18759 ) on Monday December 20, 2004 @02:15PM (#11139167) Homepage Journal

    RBL (list.dsbl.org : bl.spamcop.net : blackholes.mail-abuse.org : sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org : multihop.dsbl.org : cbl.abuseat.org) + greylistd [debian.org] == average 0 spam in inbox/day.

    What I like best about this approach is that you reject most of the spam at SMTP-time without accepting it. If I could I'd add spam-assassin-on-SMTP to the end of the chain, but my server is tight on memory :-(

    (Unfortunately there's a bug somewhere between the debian greylistd and python whereby the daemon shuts down on me all the time, but I've lodged a bug report and hope to get some help tracking it down.)

    • Sounds similar to my own solution. I don't bugger about with client-based spam filtering, it's either firewalled or filtered at the smtp level or nothing.

      IPTables --> Postfix --> (new filter that checks SPF records, not fully implemented yet) --> private access list --> RBLs (multiple, at least 20) --> Amavis --> clamd --> spamassassin --> procmail

      I don't care what anyone says, RBLs are the best solution, next to my own personal access list and my iptables blocks.

      Best solution f

  • RBLs rule (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mabu ( 178417 ) on Monday December 20, 2004 @02:18PM (#11139192)
    A well-designed RBL blocks 95+% of spam and consumes less resources than all the other solutions. Plus it has the added benefit of stopping virus and worm propagation, phish e-mails and lots of other scenarios where unauthorized SMTP relays operate.

    I see no reason to use client or server-side products that analyze the mail content, when this slows down mail service and reliability. RBLs, blocking mail based on the legitimacy of the source address has proven to be the most effective method of curtailing spam, and unlike all the other solutions, this one aversely affects spammers by not allowing them to consume your resources.

    If you're in the business of making money off selling spam products, I can see your support of these various half-way solutions, but otherwise, the best way IMO is to employ RBLs at the server level and slowly work towards SMTP whitelisting. I contend this is an inevitability if the authorities don't start prosecuting spammers for their illegal computer tampering.

    • Re:RBLs rule (Score:2, Interesting)

      by joel_snyder ( 561706 )
      You would have difficulty finding stats that support the 95% assertion. Folks like Brightmail & Postini and SenderBase aim closer to 50%, but it's a different statistic: that's blocking 50% of the incoming TCP connects, not 50% of the spam. In our own testing before the spam review started, I got numbers similar to those using SenderBase as the reputation-based scoring ahead of our mail servers.

      I would agree that a well-designed reputation-based DNS blacklist can immensely increase the spam catch rat
    • All of my RBLs that I have tried end up not doing me much. Usually I try to stack 2 or 3 of them on qmail. Do you have any recommendationson which RBL(s) I should be using? Thanks.
  • To get a junk mail filter for my real life mailbox that auto sorts into my real life recycle bin.

  • Where's SpamAssassin?

    Although a few well-meaning souls volunteered to be the contacts for SpamAssassin, when our marketting department contacted them regarding advertising no one would step up to the plate and shell-out for print ads like the other enterprise-focused vendors.

  • I don't know how much I trust their conclusions (Score:4, Informative)

    by CerebusUS ( 21051 ) on Monday December 20, 2004 @02:27PM (#11139296)
    The one product that I am familiar with is Barracuda, as we run that where I work. They claim that Barracuda doesn't support SSL for management, which is dead wrong. In fact it's very simple to _force_ the Barracuda to use SSL for this purpose.

    It's only one point, but they make a fairly big deal out of it.

    • Re:I don't know how much I trust their conclusions (Score:4, Interesting)

      by joel_snyder ( 561706 ) on Monday December 20, 2004 @02:56PM (#11139629)
      Yes, you're right; it's an error. My notes show that you can turn on SSL for management, but what got written in the article is wrong. It'll get fixed online immediately. That crept in as part of the editing process.

      On the other hand, I don't understand why ANYONE ships ANYTHING that talks on port 80 anymore. It's not like OpenSSL hasn't been proven through-and-through (or you can write your own). Port 80 might be fine for pictures of your vacation, but the management interface on a corporate mail server should be encrypted and authenticated.

      However, if you want to discount a 10,000 word article for a single error, then you're going to have a hard time believing anything you ever read anywhere ever.

  • Smart Spam Usage. (Score:3, Informative)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) * on Monday December 20, 2004 @02:28PM (#11139303)
    My Spam Level Rarely gets out of control. With Some Basic Filtering.
    1. First I setup my own domain Name which I only give to people who I want to email me, and I have it point to a mail server that will allowing emails to me@mydomain.com, but also has a different more/popular domain name accessed to it. So Whenever I need to put my Email Address in a possible Spam Area I give it me@populardomain.com So when Spam is sent the to tag will be me@populardomain.com even for the Spams that just try to guess your name it will go to popular domain to my longer domain. Next I setup my email client to filter all emails to me@populardomain.com and put them in a spambox then forward them to spam@ftc.gov. I could go further and delete them. But in the case I might get a false positive I can receive it. But normally I just highlight all and delete them. I have never gotten Spam on me@mydomain.com and 99.99999% all emails at me@populardomain.com are Spam. With the exception of the site that gives your confirmation password by email. (In that case I normally use a hotmail, yahoo account to check for the password.)
    2. Never Ever give put your email in textmode. Always make a graphic to post your email address if you really want an email contact. Or make a recording of it by voice if you are communicating to people who are visually impared. Or when you want people to email you have them go to a web form and fill out the form. (Make sure the form is programmed so people cannot make it relay to an other person)
    3. Pick a good email address. Use similar rules like you use to make a good password try to mix letters and numbers and avoid common names such as bob, ted, todd, bill, jim, max, john, jeff... these are the ones that get the most Spam.
    4. Use an email client that allows you to choose not to load images. So they cannot verify that you got the message.
    5. Report all Spam to spam@ftc.gov. If you want the spammer to go to jail then you should at least get him on the governments radar
    6. Windows user make sure you have proper virus protection. And if you give your email address to another user make sure they are doing the same.
    7. Don't send Spam yourself! if you send Spam to other people you will get Spam back as well. (And combined with other nasties)
    8. Check the privacy agreement on the website and make sure that they will not give you email address to everyone
    9. Check those checkboxes and make sure that you will not receive Spam from them they may be worded funny so that you will check yes to them.
    10. Anonymous cowards Don't get Spam! On the Internet try to maximize you anonymously.

    Spammers will Spam you if they can Guess or Get your Email Address so the trick is to make it hard for them to get it.

    • Re:Smart Spam Usage. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by msblack ( 191749 )
      This is not very practical for those running an existing domain, especially one with 40,000 users. Many coments like those of the posters state that they found effective methods. However, most lack any insight of how one might apply their methods to other users. It's easy to say, "this works for me."
    • Some Basic Filtering

      Basic? I do not think that word means what you think it means.

    • Re:Smart Spam Usage. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Just Some Guy ( 3352 ) <kirk+slashdot@strauser.com> on Monday December 20, 2004 @05:30PM (#11141305) Homepage Journal
      8. Check the privacy agreement on the website and make sure that they will not give you email address to everyone

      9. Check those checkboxes and make sure that you will not receive Spam from them they may be worded funny so that you will check yes to them.

      Rule #1: Spammers lie

      If a website is going to collection your personal information to sell to third parties, they're going to do so regardless of whether they have a nice privacy notice. Put another way, these people make their living my lying and stealing, but you expect their privacy notice to be an accurate reflection of their real intent?

      Disregard privacy notices. If they're an honest company, then they won't need one. If they're spam-friendly, then they won't care about adding one more lie to the mix.

      By the way, I find it interesting that your homepage is a link into an MLM website. I clicked the link, added a random junk item to my shopping cart, and proceeded to checkout. When it asked for my "advisor number", I followed the link to their "Finding your Advisor" search. I typed in "fras" (based on the "advno" parameter in your URL) and determined that your name is Todd Fraser, and you live in Troy, NY.

      That's about as far as I'm interested in fleshing out your personal information that you posted to the Internet. I'd call you to talk about it in person at the number Google returned when I searched for "todd fraser troy, ny" (you just live a block from a golf course - is it a nice one?) but I'm still at work.

      For trying your hardest to protect your email address, you're awfully eager to give away your real name, address, and phone number. I've given up even attempting to hide mine, but I also post to Slashdot with my real email address so I tend not to worry about such things.

  • gmail? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by museumpeace ( 735109 ) on Monday December 20, 2004 @02:56PM (#11139634) Journal
    The way their testing was conducted, they probably had to overlook spam filters that are embedded in proprietary email services but if you are only interested in getting all your mail and none of the spam, google is doing a great job.
    My gmail account has had 2 false positives out of 500 messages. Given the vulnerability to having your address fall into unknown hands that is inherent in Google's viral marketing technique for promoting the product, I would bet LOTS of other GMAIL users have the large number of spams coming in...even on new accounts where they have been careful who they gave the address too. I get about a dozen spam items a day but when one of the sh!theads sells his address list to the next spammer, I can get a burst. Bottom line: ZERO spams in my inbox...none...not any. The Bayesian stuff that spammers try to circumvent, the spoofed headers...so far none of it fools Google. And since it buffers the spam in its capacious 1Gb-per-account holdings, I have 30 days to check for false positives at my liesure.
    Questions?
    1. what vulnerability?
    when you accept a google gmail invitation, no matter how many hands it has gone through, Google posts a notification of your new address to the original giver of the invite...who could be some spammer you never met....happened to me.
    2. any pattern to the false positives?
    not sure...only have two data points. Those two items were email alerts from newspaper subscriptions which tend to be crambed with ad text and ad links...in which case, gmail is clearly trying to do me a favor and I appreciate the effort.

  • Worthless accuracy table (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Ekman ( 60679 ) on Monday December 20, 2004 @03:15PM (#11139832)
    The way they reported the results was pretty bad. The left two columns ranked products by false positives, while the right two ranked products by spam caught. It is very difficult to look at this table and get a sense of which products performed the best. For example, the top product for false positives, BorderWare at 0.04% looks very impressive until you look at the other column and see that it only caught 88%. It's easy to have a low false positive rate when your catch rate is low, too.

    At minimum, they should have taken the false positive rate, added it to the percent missed and ranked by that. Doing so sends BorderWare into the middle of the pack where it belongs, and more likely winners rise to the top. (Postini and MailFrontier). Pretty shoddy reporting when the end reader has to take your numbers and plug them into a spreadsheet to make any sense out of them.

    They could have also weighted the two error rates, but deciding on weights would be pretty subjective. Some might think false positives should be weighted higher, while others might think the opposite. Ranking them without weights would have been an acceptable compromise.

  • I know one person who uses MailWasher Pro and swears by it.

    But because of certain lame functionality, I refuse to recommend it to anyone.

    The problem is that it sends fake bounce messages to the return addresses unless you configure it otherwise. That may have changed since I looked at it, but a quick look at their web page shows that they still do the fake bounces.

    Fake bounce messages are incredibly lame since the vast majority of spam does not have the return address of the real source. On top of that

  • Where is spamgourmet? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SysKoll ( 48967 ) on Monday December 20, 2004 @03:51PM (#11140288)
    Too bad spamgourmet [spamgourmet.com] wasn't reviewed. It's free, it's open-source, it works.

    Not only does it allow you to cut off spam, it gives you traceable addresses that can be used to see who leaked email to spammers. And it's perfect against phishing attempts.

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