Comments on: A new backscatter record!

by: gluino

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 18:37:29 +0100

What about Gmail / Google Apps?
That's what I use, and I get about 20-40 spam messages per day.

I don't know how many false positives, since I don't check the spam folder often enough. So I may be missing some good mail.

by: Mighty

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 14:15:42 +0100

I was once on a host that implemented Greylisting. My experience fit their claims. It stopped about 97% of the spam. I only ever discovered one example of a false positive. Greylisting doesn't apply to backscatter. But it sure removed a lot of spam hassle. And my understanding is that it's reasonably light on server resources.

by: Coderer

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 06:57:17 +0100

Am I the only one who just uses GMail's built-in filter? I forward all my other accounts there, so it gets scrubbed on the way in. Lately I've been getting a lot of false negatives on Canadian Pharmacy stuff (all of which I "Report", and all of which looks almost identical, and all of which seems to keep missing the damn filter), but it catches the other ~95% of my spam correctly and gets less than one false positive per month, I'm pretty sure. And I don't have to lift a finger.

by: nynexman4464

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 04:00:36 +0100

I use popfile as well, but with the IMAP component. The nice thing about that is you can reclassify your mail just based on the folder you move it to, no need to go to the web interface. Only works with a single account though, and of course you need an email server that provides IMAP access.

by: pittance

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 22:04:11 +0100

Another vote for Popfile - I've always been very happy with it. As with Adlopa above I also use the categorisation it lets you do to separate personal mail from actual people from various other mails that I get. That being said I don't get enormous amounts of real mail so any spam filter could get 99.9% accuracy by just deleting everything...

by: Adlopa

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 19:42:12 +0100

Oh and Popfile/Outclass can filter all kinds of mail, not just spam - I find it invaluable for filtering press releases and other guff into folders without having to create an Outlook rule for each sender/subject/whatever - I can just filter on the Popfile-amended header.

by: Adlopa

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 19:40:11 +0100

+1 for Popfile. It's also available for Outlook with Outclass (sorta - it uses your Popfile data).

by: Chazzozz

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 08:18:48 +0100

I do something similar as Dan, but the other way around. My filter of choice is POPFile. It can only classify once the message has been downloaded, but I've got my email client set to only retreive headers + a selected number of the first lines of the body. If a message is marked as spam then I simply delete it from the server through the email client, and fully download the rest of the 'good' emails. POPFile's got a neat feature where it can write a special URL into the headers that points directly to the message in the corpus. Click on it and you're taken to the POPFile web interface with that email displayed. Very handy for easy reclassification.

by: scartier

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 08:19:42 +0100

MWP for me. Once I got my filters sufficiently tuned the amount of spam I actually see became tiny. I get maybe one a day now. My favorite filters search for obfuscated words. It will delete mails with "m-o-r-t-g-a-g-e", but not "mortgage". Other useful ones filter out various spellings of "viagra" and other drugs. Even if the spam spells it "\/í@§rª" it'll be nuked from orbit. Well, nuked from the atmosphere I guess since it still does make its way to my PC.

by: JonH

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 04:23:54 +0100

I use an Astaro (free home version) gateway I made out of an old machine I had lying around. Among the other things it does is email filtering and automatic virus scanning. It can be a bit tough to configure, but once you get the hang of how they do things, it's not that bad. I've been very satisfied with it.