The spam conundrum

"While Bayesian scoring worked well initially, spammers have learned to trick the system."

I'm not so sure how clued up this guy is. Bayesian Poisoning can be cured with Bayesian Noise Reduction, and if combined with a well train Neural Net, Bayesian filtering is powerful!
 
GMAIL!! GMAIL!!

I only ever had one false positive from my medical aid, just unspammed it, I just briefly glance at the sender list and if I don't see anyone I know its bye bye spam. More systems should get part of their spam lists from google..
 
supersunbird said:
GMAIL!! GMAIL!!

I only ever had one false positive from my medical aid, just unspammed it, I just briefly glance at the sender list and if I don't see anyone I know its bye bye spam. More systems should get part of their spam lists from google..
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I think part of their success is the "Report as Spam" button... so whatever gets by their own filters quickly gets labeled as spam by millions of users.

I also just glance through the spambox to see if there is anything important there.. .and then hit delete all.
 
I say their should be a pay for email type system. Where you pay a bit or money to email someone. You pay the ISP or the network carrier or something. Same as the postal service. Even if its something silly like 10c it will still increase the cost of spam from being free.

Good luck implimenting that system tho.
 
Track down 10 spammers world wide, line them up and shoot them all in front of live world wide TV for all to see. I am sure they will have to think twice before hitting the 'Send' button again... Nah, surely, if the spammers need an ISP, and the ISP monitors the traffic volumes, then the ISP's should know who is spamming and just reduce the bandwidth available to them.
 
supersunbird said:
GMAIL!! GMAIL!!

I only ever had one false positive from my medical aid, just unspammed it, I just briefly glance at the sender list and if I don't see anyone I know its bye bye spam. More systems should get part of their spam lists from google..
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yeah gmail is great, ive used hotmail for yonks and never get spam, but what about the corporates where most of the damage would be done, our mail is constantly bombarded by spam, our hosting company cannot prevent it, they try and fail miserably. Only takes a few months to receive over 1k of spam mails.

The answer is simple, stop clicking on the bloody links, and stop replying to that chick who "has been looking all her life for you" on a different email address. Spammers are making bucket loads from stupid ppl following through.

:sick:i hate spam:sick:
 
Garyvdh said:
I think part of their success is the "Report as Spam" button... so whatever gets by their own filters quickly gets labeled as spam by millions of users.
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Agree.
However, even though GMail's spam filters work well sometimes they work too well. :) I get quite a few false positives where legitimate emails end up being labelled as spam. Unfortunately the 'not spam' button does not seem to have any effect (in my case). Only method that really works well is to create filters and select the "never send it to spam" option.
 
DJTazzz said:
Track down 10 spammers world wide, line them up and shoot them all in front of live world wide TV for all to see. I am sure they will have to think twice before hitting the 'Send' button again... Nah, surely, if the spammers need an ISP, and the ISP monitors the traffic volumes, then the ISP's should know who is spamming and just reduce the bandwidth available to them.
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public executions will put a stop to a lot of problems, but alas......
 
Tns said:
public executions will put a stop to a lot of problems, but alas......
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Yes, and broadcast in HD as well! :D

I opened a hotmail account once years ago when I was traveling overseas, and couldn't access my regular mail. Didn't even send one email, before I started getting spam. I have been using Gmail for a couple of weeks now, spam-free so far, and only one or two false-positives.

I use the Evolution email client in Linux at home and at work, anything spam that comes through I mark as junk, and never see it again. I like this. :)

B
 
Bismuth said:
I use the Evolution email client in Linux at home and at work, anything spam that comes through I mark as junk, and never see it again. I like this. :)

B
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Most probably a machine learning filter that learns what you think is spam.

Anyways doing my research at varsity this year in Spam filtering methods, comparing heuristic versus statistic. So far, from the literature it seems that the statistic filter should perform really well in a specific environment, so I am going to try emulate one. If anyone is interested in what I find when i'm done, it will be on my website, pm for a link.

Also come across a few papers that show that gmail is seriously too tough on mail and returns too many false positives in a bid to minimize false negatives. I considered including gmail for my research, though it seems like they use a mixture of filtering techniques.
 
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Mail Washer works for us. Blacklist spam and it gets bounced with a "Delivery failure notification" to the sender. 2 - 3 weeks and you are spam free...
 
I set our company spam filter to delete spam automatically - big mistake:o

I didn't get an email about a course being postponed, sand showed up at the venue like an idiot:o.
 
I run a mail server with sendmail and spamassassin. Tuning the spam filter is really a mission, but after about a year I've gotten it reasonably good. One or two spam messages do slip through every month or so but the spam folders are bursting at the seams and have to be cleaned out at 2-3 week intervals.

The only way to fight a technology war is with technology
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Although the initial cost is going to be high, I think it's time the IETF looked seriously at revising the e-mail protocols and putting in some measures that will prevent spam being propagated at all.
 
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Turiko said:
Although the initial cost is going to be high, I think it's time the IETF looked seriously at revising the e-mail protocols and putting in some measures that will prevent spam being propagated at all.
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I think the IETF would appreciate any suggestions you have about this. Its definitely not something that they are ignoring - they have some of the brightest Internet minds working on solutions and they still haven't come up with anything.
 
@ Turiko: I've got the same Sendmail / SpamAssassin / Procmail Mail Filter to handle our spam. I have to say that getting the whole setup to work as planned was a mission, and it did take a lot of time! To get SpamAssassin to "learn" what you think is spam and what is ham does take a lot of practice (if I have to guess I would say about 2 - 3 months). Now, my system is so clued up that I don't get even one false positive. Yes, one or two spam mails tends to slip through but then just hit the "REPORT AS SPAM" and that mail is gone! :D

@TNS: I agree with the public execution! They should make an example of a spammer to teach other spammers! :D If only it were that easy!
 
DJTazzz said:
Nah, surely, if the spammers need an ISP, and the ISP monitors the traffic volumes, then the ISP's should know who is spamming and just reduce the bandwidth available to them.
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Most spam these days are sent out by botnets, so a specific spam message would originate from 1000's of different locations ... impossible to detect except at the point where it arrives.
 
spacemuis said:
Most spam these days are sent out by botnets, so a specific spam message would originate from 1000's of different locations ... impossible to detect except at the point where it arrives.
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Yip, you'd be stupid to use your home PC to send out spam, the bandwidth usage alone would give you away.

So long as people are willing to "pass this onto 10 friends to <get something good> else <something bad will happen>", there will always be spam.
 
There will always be spam as long as it is profitable
 
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