Re: [PLUG] interesting solution to spam overload

[Jeff Abrahamson <jeff@purple.com>]

On Fri, Dec 15, 2006 at 01:19:10PM -0500, Austin Murphy wrote:
>   [27 lines, 211 words, 1372 characters]  Top characters: eti_osan
> 
> On 12/15/06, Jeff Abrahamson <jeff@purple.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, Dec 15, 2006 at 08:46:44AM -0500, Austin Murphy wrote:
> > > Does anyone have effective spam filtering and training done the
> > > "UNIX Way" (small tools working together)?  It's easy enough to
> > > stick a mail filter in front of your inbox, but it's not trivial
> > > to setup a good ruleset or keep it up to date.
> >
> > Something does some envelope filtering before my machine, but I
> > find that bogofilter is catching 200 emails per day as spam
> > (essentially zero false positives) and misses 2-5 spams per day.
> > I'm ok with that.
> >
> > Part of my morning routine (er, script), in addition to popping up
> > xkcd, phd comics, dilbert, the weather, some news sites, etc.,
> > runs "xterm -e mutt -f bogofilter-...", the cull of the past day
> > or so of putative spam, which I scan and reality check.  Doing it
> > once a day takes less than a minute, which proves manageable and
> > allows me to say "essentially zero false positives."
> 
> Does this train bogofilter?

No, you train it by giving it a set of things that is spam and a set
of things that is not.  But as it finds spam it learns, meaning if it
does miscategorize, I have to tell it.  How you tell it depends on you
and your MUA.  In mutt, I just wrote a macro that pipes the message
back to bogofilter with the right flags.


> How do you identify a random message as spam?

Random is definitely spam. ;-)

Bogofilter is a Bayesian classifier.  It learns from the set of things
you give it.  The docs are pretty easy to follow: they were written by
ESR.

-- 
 Jeff

 Jeff Abrahamson  <http://jeff.purple.com/>          +1 215/837-2287
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