SpamAssassin 3.0 Released 335
davemabe writes "At long last, SpamAssassin 3.0.0 has been released. I've been using the release candidates for a month or so, and the results have been far improved over previous versions. Its use of SURBL along with Bayes auto learning make it seem like this solution is the one to beat. It looks like they've introduced a new logo as well. Snazzy!"
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Artificial intelligence was born... (Score:0, Interesting)
Filtering spam.
Plugin Architecture (Score:5, Interesting)
Version 3.0 will result in a proliferation of good third party plug-ins that are going to put SA into more direct competition with some of the commercial vendors out there.
Re:SURBL (Score:2, Interesting)
Release notes? (Score:2, Interesting)
Purple Bayes... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Improved Performance? (Score:5, Interesting)
-- Performance is MUCH better than it used to be. It scans messages much faster than I've ever seen SA 2.x do, and doesn't hog my server's resources anymore.
-- THIS THING ROCKS. For almost two weeks after I installed it I kept instinctively sending myself test emails to make sure I hadn't broken my mail system, because my volume of incoming mail had reduced so drastically. I was used to getting at least a new spam every 2 minutes. After installing SA 3.0 I got one false negative in a 72 hour period. It is *that* good. To date I still have not recorded a single false positive. I really had to convince myself that this thing was real.
This spamfilter rocks. I'd award it product of the year if I could.
New logo ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:anto-spam (Score:5, Interesting)
Contrary to DSPAM author's claims, both it and and CRM-114 (another package which likes to self-hype) performed quite a bit worse than SpamAssassin.
Then again, I've heard people being happy with DSPAM that were not happy with SA.
Guess it depends on the mailfeed you get.
Performance (Score:4, Interesting)
It would be nice if it could be implemented now as I personally receive about 1000 spam messages a week.
Re:A spam arms race? (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, I'm using spamassassin on my server (and have been for the past 2 years). Unfiltered, I get around 200 spam per day. 1 or 2 get through.
It's been that way since the day I installed it. and it doesn't appear that the spammers are using any substantially "smarter methods"
Maybe it really is easier to write a filter than it is to write filter-proof spam.
Re:Artificial intelligence was born... (Score:5, Interesting)
Artificial intelligence was born... Filtering spam.
In Greg Egan's _Permutation City_, spam filters and spam become ever more intelligent. Your spam filter runs the interactive video mail in a sandbox trying to detect whether it's spam, the spam tries to detect that it is in a sandbox or that it is talking to an AI construct, so that it can hide its commercial intent. Your filter tries to mimic you (and you review its reactions now and then, try to get its facial expressions ever more like yours, etc), the spammers try to get more information about you so they can try to fool your filter by making the spam look like on of your friends, etc.
This is an obvious arms race and in that book, AI and uploaded individuals etc exist - but the trick is to make your AI spam filters as good as possible without making them actually self-conscious, since using self-conscious AI software for spam filtering would be torture.
I rather liked that idea.
Re:Does it use IP's or URI's ? (Score:2, Interesting)
So, would either SA 3.0 take care of this naturally, or allow me to easily write a plugin to resolve the addresses in links and apply my own IP address based blacklist?
Re:Improved Performance? (Score:3, Interesting)
[...] and doesn't hog my server's resources anymore.
Got any numbers on memory use? I would love to run SA on my home server, but it has "only" got 80MB of RAM. I tried running 2.x, but it seriously brought the system to its knees (swapping)
I must say, Python might be a nice language and all, but as it's making inroads everywhere it's also wrecking havoc on ones ability to convert older hardware into a competent server. YMMV (mailman + bittorrent + (apache + exim + samba) and you're pretty much down to the last few megabytes )
Damn... (Score:2, Interesting)
In fact, I thought their logo contest rules suggested that they would prefer the new one to contain those guys still, in some way or another.
Re:SURBL (Score:5, Interesting)
Spam is a technical problem, not political (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Does it use IP's or URI's ? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Does it use IP's or URI's ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:anto-spam (Score:3, Interesting)
SpamAssassin 2.x with well trained (>1 year of spam @ 100+ spams/day) Bayes:
~5% false negative (~95% spam filtering accuracy, 1 in 20 spams let through).
DSPAM with large training corpus (~10k spams from a honeypot) plus 6 weeks of real mail at same spam rate:
0.45% false negative (99.55% spam filtering accuracy, 1 in 222 spams let through).
I now publicise an inoculation honeypot address: yumyum@easyweb.co.uk for spammers to harvest, which adds super-strength training.
I'm very happy with my move to DSPAM [easyweb.co.uk].
Further, I don't believe heuristic filtering works any more, particularly if you're using published heuristics/shared rules. Spammers adapt too quickly, and test their spam against known rulebases. The solution is I believe to go entirely statistical, allowing each user to have their own definition of spam that is untestable by spammers.
(Incidentally, ever seen the SpamAssassin header forgery spam [easyweb.co.uk] now being used?
Debian installation (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Does it use IP's or URI's ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Extreme spamfighters don't care though. You're guilty by association in their eyes and deserve to feel the same wrath that the spammers do. It's so that you'll bitch to your provider and in turn your provider will shut down the spam site because all their other customers are complaining vs. some random guys on the Internet complaining they're receiving that URL in spam.
Great Book on it (Score:3, Interesting)
The sections on rules are extremely nice, and I found them pretty informative as to how the software works underneath. It covers version 3, too, so it's damned timely.
-Erwos
Spaminator (Score:2, Interesting)
Earthlink Spaminator(TM) [tiac.net]
Seems like they're kind of wasting a name that would work pretty well in the market.
Antispam Gateway Distribution? (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems like there are linux distributions for just about anything you might want: routers, pvrs, etc. Are there any linux distributions designed to be a mail anti-spam/anti-virus (or just anti=spam) gateway?
The reason I think this would be cool is because configuring mail apps on linux can be hard and because this would be a great linux foot-in-the-door distribution for Exchange admins who didn't want to pay thousands of dollars for antispam gateways.
Redirection from google, rd.yahoo, etc. (Score:1, Interesting)
It works good, but they are already defeating this by using things such as RD.YAHOO.COM which redirects to their spam site. This defeats the SURD I use.
Granted, RD.Yahoo is secure now, but there are many others.
Once folks really start using SURD, how hard will it be for the spammers to link to:
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache%3Agetvisit
Which is a Google copy of a spam site.
Exciting! (Score:2, Interesting)
You'd be amazed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Does it use IP's or URI's ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Your suggested technique would be exploited by script kiddies everywhere (who already have access to large zombie networks) to basically ban someone from the internet. What a fantastic idea.
An invitation to fellow spam-fighters (Score:3, Interesting)
That's the point at which we become interested in SpamAssassin users joining WPBL [pc9.org], an automated spam reporting system. Powered by scripts living in procmail and cron, participating systems send WPBL lists of IP addresses sending spam and ham. The central server crunches this data hourly to produce a list [rsync://rsync.pc9.org/wpbl/wpbl-blocks.cidr] of blocked IP addresses that are spam sources.
If your site uses SA and you have verified your spam detection accuracy as nearly-perfect, you might be interested in contributing your spam/ham sighting stats to WPBL. The resulting block list can be used by anyone (and is used by some ISPs for spam scoring). The way I think of it is, after you've taken care of the spam problem at your site why not help tell the rest of the world where spam is coming from.
Re:Does it use IP's or URI's ? (Score:3, Interesting)
May fvorite was a Washington DC news company that had implemented extreme spamfighting measures. Since our outgoing mail server doesn't receive incoming mail, its not in the MX records. This guy was bouncing our mail because of that. God hopes that the next Deep throught doesn't try to contact his news organization...
Re:Installing on Windows....you're kidding, right? (Score:2, Interesting)
I for one prefer this kind of install when loading up geeky type things like this. You learn more about your machine and the application, what its doing, and where it is in case you want to modify or otherwise play with it. And really, how can you NOT want to konw this? Your computer is a tool. The more you konw about it the more powerful it becomes.
If you don't want to do all of that, then suffer with what is probably an inferior product. Not all freeware is entirely "free".
On the flip side: when I'm installing games, I'm more than happy to just sit back, drink my beer, and watch the pretty little installation graphics twirl and dance for me. I just wanna get to the killin'.
Re:Installing on Windows....you're kidding, right? (Score:1, Interesting)
or how to have a pop3 proxy integrated with SA just in case you are a poor windoze like me and your mails are in the ISP server
Description is mine. I did myself have to learn some perl just to be able to install saproxy
But it works so nicely
There is even a perl -> exe thingy that works marvelous, so perl installation can be skipped!
Should there be any perl monk wishing to help