Re: [SLUG] Re: DSPAM vs SpamAssassin FYI

[mlh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

On Sun, Feb 22, 2004 at 03:39:48PM +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> So, who's been having fun with their anti-spam tools recently? I'm still
> using spamassassin and bogofilter [1] these days, but finding more and more
> crap in my real inbox, thanks to all this random-text crap. Gar.

I've been using bogofilter too.  I have about 15,000 messages
of junk mail divided up into spam/scam/virus/bogus delivery messages.

I trained bogofilter on my spam and ham (ham being all
my archived mailing list mail and personal mail archives)

The results were ok.  I got far too many false positives.
The main false positives were mail from myself at work
with a single web site link -- I mail myself interesting
links to read.  So these look pretty spammy, although
I obviously need a whitelist.

I really dislike false positives, and I don't see how
bayesian analysis can avoid them.  I'm always going to
have the occasionally valid but spammy look mail.

As unfortunate as it is, I think the only way to combat
spam is to make it expensive to send by default.

Expensive here means more expensive than a good return
return by the spammers.  Say the spammers get a hit rate
of selling $100 worth of stuff for every million messages,
then the cost of sending mail should be at least double
that rate -- it should cost them about $200 to send a million
messages.

Is there any mail client that integrates tightly with
spam detectors?  I'd like to click on a column to sort
messages by spamicity.

Matt