Mozilla Adding Spam Filters 483
ksheka writes "Mozilla mail now has Spam Filters, using Bayesian filtering method, no less. This is a very good thing, because it learns from the spam you receive, and constantly modifies itself, based on new spammer techniques!"
DOWNLOAD NEW MOZILLA (Score:2, Funny)
Click HERE!
Re:DOWNLOAD NEW MOZILLA (Score:4, Funny)
102 Features IE doesn't have (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:102 Features IE doesn't have (Score:4, Interesting)
http://research.microsoft.com/~horvitz/junkfilter. htm [microsoft.com]
Re:102 Features IE doesn't have (Score:3, Insightful)
So, that brings it down to, what, 97? Still a pretty good list. However, I've heard that popup blockers and tabbed browsing are making their way into IE (and MS employees can already use these features), but we'll see if they're actually integrated.
Outlook is part of the IE Package (Score:4, Informative)
E-mail is Outlook's domain. Not IE.
It's possible to net-install Mozilla without installing Mozilla Mail, but the default setting includes both. It's possible to net-install IE without installing Outlook Express, but the default setting includes both. Thus, it is a fair comparison.
100. Bugzilla - OK, lots of people use this, but Bugzilla != Mozilla. So it's not like Mozilla has built-in Bugzilla features... This is unrelated to the list.
I think the point of that entry was that unlike IE's bug database, which only Microsoft employees see, Mozilla's bug database is 99% open to the public (the other 1% primarily covers unfixed security vulnerabilities).
Won't anyone PLEASE think of the popup advertisers (Score:5, Funny)
IE is the most widely used brower and pop-up advertising has become part of the Internet Experience. If MS decides to incorporate popup blocking in IE, then the pop-up advertising business is RUINED! They'll just be another group victimized by a huge corporation. These people have families to support and will be forced to send their children to public schools. Won't someone PLEASE think of the children?
And all this news about fixing vulnerabilities within Windows is going to affect the virus community as well (both authors and anti-virus). Worrying about vulnerability exploits has also become part of the computer experience.
Won't someone PLEASE think of the virus writers?
Re:102 Features IE doesn't have (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree that Microsoft is scanning around and implementing good features, but no one other than /.'ers will ever know they got the idea from someone else. You're only playing 'catch-up' if there's something to catch-up to. IE has over 90% of the internet userbase, I'd say *that* was something to catch-up to.
Re:102 Features IE doesn't have (Score:3, Interesting)
your .sig (Score:5, Funny)
Two brothers immigrated to a mostly Catholic country, hungry and looking for work. Pavlov, whose forehead was quite thick, found work at a monastery bell tower. The monks taught him to tell time, then sound the bell when appropriate. Not too bright, Pavlov missed the part about how to sound the bell. So he notes the time on his handy wristwatch, climbs the belltower, inches up to the edge of the platform, and dives face first into the massive centuries-old bell. KKKLLLAAANNNGGG!!! Poor Pavlov falls to his death hundreds of feet below.
Apparently, monks don't communicate very well. No one in the crowd gathered around Pavlov's remains could identify him. Finally one monk admits, "I never caught his name, but his face sure rings a bell."
Mysteriously, a man steps forward from the crowd and insists on taking Pavlov's place as caretaker of the belltower. One of the monks removes the wristwatch from Pavlov's arm, gives it to the mystery man, and precedes to indoctrinate him in his duties. On the hour, just like Pavlov, our mystery man ascends the tower, perches on the edge -- but this time wielding a massive sledgehammer. He leaps towards the bell and smashes it with Thor-like fury. KKKLLLAAANNNGGG!!! The poor fool falls to his death in a manner very similar to Pavlov's.
Much like deja vu, a muted crowd gathers around the mystery man's remains. After an extended silence, one monk asks, "Does anyone know this man's name?" Answers another, "No, but he's a dead ringer for his brother!"
Here's the link (Score:3, Informative)
101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that IE cannot [xulplanet.com]
Re:102 Features IE doesn't have (Score:2, Informative)
Re:102 Features IE doesn't have (Score:5, Funny)
Arms Race (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Arms Race (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Arms Race (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Arms Race (Score:3, Informative)
No they have the feedback and they know what works and what does not.
Re:Arms Race (Score:2)
Re:How? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Arms Race (Score:2)
Re:Arms Race (Score:5, Informative)
The added advantage is that you can pipe these through procmail/spamassassin just like ordinary incoming mail, and not have to manually delete all that spam.
Re:Arms Race (Score:2, Informative)
For instance, someone who often receieves links to web pages, from strangers, their filter will let through more spam than someone who Never receives links from strangers.
Re:Arms Race (Score:3, Insightful)
No they won't, unless the pattern (if there is one discernable in the S/N ratio) of replies they receive changes. As most spam, as far as spammers goes, disappears into a black hole, they have no way of learning how your filters are working.
And that's good filterin'!
Re:Arms Race (Score:5, Insightful)
There will still need to be header information and actual spam content in the spams themselves for those mails simply to not be repeats or dada-esque cutups of posts to the mailing list. That is, there must be content unique to the spam that no normal sender on the list will include.
Because of this, and the fact that so-called Bayesian spam filtering works by scoring all the words in an email and then evaluating the email based only on the extremes, there is little likelihood-- since the spam must still contain spam words to have any point at all-- of those words not being on the extreme word list. After all, if the same words are appearing in both spam and not-spam mails, they will be given a spam-probability that is not extreme. So all those words in common will be ignored and only the spam words will be looked at-- and the spam will still be filtered.
Re:Arms Race (Score:3, Interesting)
And, even if they could afford to keep it up for a while, my spam filter will get better faster than their spam. This is the "Ambassador's criterion" from SDI (briefly: Star Wars won't lead to an arms race if it gets to the point where shooting down an the marginal missile is cheaper than building the marginal missile).
I think we may just win the Spam Wars yet.
A little misleading (Score:5, Informative)
It will be great when it's more complete but there is a lot of work to do yet.
Re:A little misleading (Score:5, Informative)
It is up and running, it just may have a few bugs.
I just downloaded the latest nightly build [mozilla.org] and enabled the features for my mail. So far I have seen that the icons are kind of funky, the dialog box is way oversized, there doesn't appear to be a good way of marking multiple messages as spam or not spam.
On the other hand, it does seem to be doing a good job of filtering my messages. If you were one of the folks that complained about mozilla until mozilla 1.1 or 1.2, then I wouldn't go near it with a ten foot pole. If you are one of the folks, like me, who used mozilla since milestone 11 when it crashed every hour and couldn't render a heck of a lot of pages, you'll probably want to try it. Especially, if you use mozilla for mail anyway.
Great gob Mozilla, but... (Score:2, Offtopic)
Compile Mozilla from scratch, and you'll see that you can custom tailor the build and cut out a lot of cruft. Of course, if you just want the browser, go for Phoenix, but really compiling on your own puts you in the drivers seat and optimize it to your own needs.
The problem here is that binary distributions package it all together, so the result is the full-fledged Mozilla. Before you Gentoo zealots get out here and plug your so-loved-distro, remember that even you don't have as much control as you could.
Basically, my point is that all these features are a Good Thing, and that complaining about the bloat is silly, since it can be custom tailored to fit your needs.
Re:Great gob Mozilla, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Compile Mozilla from scratch, and you'll see that you can custom tailor the build and cut out a lot of cruft.mpile Mozilla from scratch, and you'll see that you can custom tailor the build and cut out a lot of cruft.
The source package is far larger than the binaries! Then there's the wait in compiling the damn thing. No (L)User is going to do that. Maybe us geeks (and I do use the source, Luke), but certainly not a "normal" user.
The problem here is that binary distributions package it all together
So download the Net installer and choose only what you want?
Re:Great gob Mozilla, but... (Score:3, Informative)
Re: Mozilla bloat [...] Gentoo (Score:3, Informative)
Filtering (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Filtering (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Filtering (Score:3, Interesting)
BTW, there are ways of getting around Bayesian filtering. For instance, if you take random words from a large dictionary of long, normal conversational but not-often-used-in-spam words and splatter them throughout your spam, its easy to convince the bayesian filter that it's not spam. Not only will this decrease your false negatives, it has the capability of increasing your false positives. This is because your new spam will be training your bayesian filter, and putting lots of non-spam-like words into its vocabulary. If the spammers keep up with their dictionaries as well as the filters keep up with theirs (and I must assume this will happen), we've still got a big problem on our hands.
Don't get me wrong. I have bogofilter installed on my mail server at home, and it works great for now. But don't expect it to work forever.
Re:Filtering (Score:3, Insightful)
In my experience, 99% of spam can be caught with static rules (am I in the TO or CC line gets a bit under half the spam I receive). Taxonomical analysis of the subject and body can get the rest.
Bayesian seems like overkill, or maybe even a bad fit. Let's face it, the other well known use for Bayesian is the famous Microsoft Office Paper Clip!!! And that is about as useful as the proverbial ashtray on a motorbike!!
Gary
Re:Filtering (Score:5, Insightful)
How much time are you going to spend on training your spam filter? If you are unwilling to invest a little time and effort in developing a solid set of values that fit your personal pattern of behavior, then Bayesian filters are indeed a poor match for you.
2) What harm is a false positive?
If you are automatically deleting anything that is marked as a positive for spam, then you are playing roulette with your email. I would generally recommend diverting email classified as spam by your filter to a folder, especially one that is relatively new and has had very little experience with your patterns of use. Set an expiry on your spam folder, and check it from time to time to see if something fell through the cracks. Mozilla has a handy feature that allows you to simply conceal spam from view, which works adequately, although I dislike the potential performance hit in a large folder.
Considering how important your email is to you, you should certainly consider applying a little diligence to how you manage it.
DIY Spam Filtering (Score:3, Insightful)
First of all, I have a favored mailing list of people who are important, which is always sent to my hotmail inbox (I've been using it for 5 years+).
Second, I browse through the spam to make sure there's not anything I'm missing -- I have lost letters through filtering, which relies on a machine that has no way of truly knowing what's spam and what's not, and with spammers growing smarter every day, it's best to take a minute and DIY.
Re:DIY Spam Filtering (Score:5, Funny)
Mozilla mail / browser (Score:4, Interesting)
Now that would be very nifty!
Mod this guy up!! That's brilliant (Score:2)
Re:Mozilla mail / browser (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Mozilla mail / browser (Score:2, Informative)
URLs are generally cryptic numbers, so that even humans can't decipher what they are.
Although there are certain apps out there (such as Norton PErsonal FW) that let you block a certain add from ever popping up again. Which I find very cool.
zilla (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:zilla (Score:5, Informative)
For one I sort my mail by thread, while Mozilla will use reference headers to thread messages, the fall back is the subject. Without a subject your message would be tossed in the thread with the other loosers who also forgot their subject.
The easy way to keep that dialog box from popping up when you send a mail is to...put a subject on the message.
If you want a spell checker go to the Netscape FTP server find the XPI file for the spell checker and install it.
Re:zilla (Score:5, Funny)
The "blah blah blah" is roughly, "You have not specified a subject. Would you like to enter one now?" Perhaps you're right, it should be changed. Instead, it should say, "You're about to send an email message without a subject. That's an amazingly rude thing to do and likely to irritate the recipient as it makes it harder for them to pioritize their incoming mail and harder to distinguish from spam. Because this is such a terrible idea, you should enter a subject line below. If you fail to enter a subject, the default entry of 'I'm a idiot, please delete this message without reading it' will be used."
Hope it doesn't have false positives (Score:2, Interesting)
I had the benefit of working with this technology for a classification problem here at work. I was amazed at how good it worked. We were using it to replace a purely human process.
However, there is one huge problem. Incorrect classification. Blind tests against a known dataset showed 80%+ correctness. The problem is, you don't know which 20% is wrong. Thus, you still need 100% inspection to validate the results.
When applied to mail filters, I wonder how the technology avoids dumping your good mail? Like when your friend sends you a URL to good pr0n site.
Yeah, but... (Score:3, Funny)
One question... (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be neat if, with IMAP accounts, Mozilla just stored the statistics in a file on IMAP server instead of on the client.
Re:One question... (Score:2)
The real fix is full roaming profiles so I can have a master profile on a server with all my bookmarks, cookies, mail and spam settings, etc., but it seems like that feature is still a ways off
So you really want... (Score:5, Informative)
Server-side filtering (Score:3, Informative)
So client-side seems like the right place for bayesian filtering right now.
Re:One question... (Score:3, Interesting)
SpamAssassin + Mozilla = Schweet! (Score:5, Interesting)
But, for those that make it past the email shadow warrior, I guess Bayesian filters are a double whammy they'll never survive... Mwahahahaha!
Kudos to the Mozilla programmers!
Microsoft's Patent (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Microsoft's Patent (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Microsoft's Patent (Score:5, Informative)
Zero False Positives! (Score:2, Insightful)
Since I have some rather vulgar friends I've been weary to apply filters based on message content. For the most part I've been blocking by sender with only marginal success. I can't wait to see this actually implemented so users can do some large and broad scale testing to see if his claim to zero false positive's is correct.
Hope they carry this over to Minotaur.
Pheonix Rocks [mozilla.org]
Since some of us run Windows, (Score:5, Informative)
My only complaint... (Score:3, Interesting)
In Mozilla (last I checked) for every account you setup it creates a new set of folders.
Since I've got a catchall account, I'd like to tie multiple email addresses to one set.
Anybody out there on the Mozilla team listening?
Re:My only complaint... (Score:5, Funny)
It's like, if you want to submit a complaint to Microsoft, you write them a letter to their company address instead of, say, writing your complaint as graffiti on a New York subway car. Wait a minute, actually, you might run into a MS employee doing butterfly graffiti, so that's a bad analogy... Plus, a subway isn't a good metaphor for Slashdot. The
You know what would be cool? (Score:5, Funny)
1. Says "someone is testing something and you get $NN.00"
2. Says anything like "angels watching over us" or "a mother's poem" or other such bullshit.
3. Says "This is really funny"
4. Says "We'll be over on Tuesday right during dinner when you are trying to put the moves on our daughter/your wife."
Umm, not the last one, really. Just got on a roll.
PDHoss
Eudora finally has the filter I need (Score:3, Informative)
This, comibined with some clever regex filters I already had means that I can reliably get the 10% of my mail that I actually want to read.
Good example of MS's monopoly abuse (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good example of MS's monopoly abuse (Score:5, Insightful)
No need to apologize - I love a good MS-bashing rant as much as the next
I do, however, feel that it's not as big a problem as you do..
The app and mail client development teams aren't implementing these features because the Microsoft ISP wants to be able to tout the ability to filter spam and block popups.
This may (or may not - although I'm inclined to agree with your views) be true, but the important thing to understand is that the MTA (ISP)-level is where spam blocking belongs.
The real problem with spam is that it steals bandwidth - blocking spam after it's already sitting in your mailbox is like closing the barn door after the horses have eaten your children - the bandwidth has already been used, so you don't gain anything... having your email client "block" spam isn't really blocking it, it's just an automatic "delete key".. which is what the spammers want (how many of them say spam isn't a problem because you can "just hit delete")
MS's intentions aside, the solution they have is the correct one, even if their motives are suspect.
Re:Good example of MS's monopoly abuse (Score:3, Insightful)
Ya, you should have shot those man-eating horses to begin with. Seriously though, don't you think we should have laws against this type of mail fraud (forging headers and the like) instead of simply trying to "block" the fraud at the ISP level? I suppose blocking as well can't hurt, but freedom requires punishing the guilty and only the guilty.
The last thing I want is Microsoft deciding which emails destined to me are "spams". (subscription email from FSF? Must be spam!)
Re:Good example of MS's monopoly abuse (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd argue that the time wasted on filtering spam is more valuable than the bandwidth wasted delivering it. This is why I am glad that Apple was able to bring good client-side spam filtering to the people with Mail [apple.com] and that Mozilla will soon provide this feature as well.
if spam gets through.. (Score:5, Funny)
Pleeeease??
"Bayesian filtering" aka "Naive Bayes" (Score:5, Informative)
The author of the web page on using this technique to classify spam (Paul Graham) has a better explanation of Naive Bayes on this web page [paulgraham.com].
I've written my own naive Bayes classifier to identify spam, with less positive results than he reports. However, naive Bayes can be a very effective technique, and I can believe his results.
The two things you have to beware of when using it are "smoothing" probabilities of words you've never seen (you don't want them to always be zero, as straight naive Bayes will give you), and you need LOTS of training data for naive Bayes to work well. That means that you need to already have a fair amount of spam to identify spam well.
You can see a paper I wrote on using naive Bayes to classify hard drive failures here [nec.com], or look for more stuff on naive Bayes on Google [google.com]. Also, don't reinvent the wheel: Andrew McCallum has written a very good toolkit for doing these sorts of things in Bow [cmu.edu].
Re:"Bayesian filtering" aka "Naive Bayes" (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm glad to see that the software industry is taking the SPAM problem seriously. And it's great to hear that more and more states, like Massachusetts, are enacting laws to curb the abuse of email systems.
I've been dependent on some static rules to curb SPAM (about 90% effective), but I think now it's time to implement more serious anti-spam measures.
Re:"Bayesian filtering" aka "Naive Bayes" (Score:3, Interesting)
It may be naive, but I was very surprised at how well it worked. It's better than SpamAssassin IMO, especially at foreign-language spam.
Client-Side Filtering is Wasteful (Score:5, Insightful)
Since you must first download the content for client-side filtering to work you waste bandwidth. If you are truly bombarded by spam you still lose...your mail spool still gets filled up with stuff you don't want, your data transfers compete for bandwidth with the spam, storage hardware works harder storing data that will only be deleted. It raises everyone's costs, including yours.
We need to block undesired mail at the host, not filter it at the client. That way the spam never gets sent, the spammer gets the message that their attempt was futile, and bandwidth is conserved. Many ISPs already provide this service...we need to improve on it. And we need better tools for identifying and dealing with spammers. The current mail standards are woefully inadequate to this task.
interesting idea... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm almost thinking a distributed and automated anti-spam system like that could completely crush the spam problem within a 12 month period.
or I may be completely out of my mind.
Re:interesting idea... (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean, you've been on the internet before, right? You've seen the other people here, too? Think about it.
=Brian
Re:interesting idea... (Score:3, Informative)
Not impressed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not impressed (Score:4, Interesting)
But it still learns in either mode! Early on my shipping notices from Amazon.com (and even Apple.com, ha ha) were being flagged as Junk, but not anymore. I think it's great and will only improve with time, with others' caveats about client-side email spam checking being flawed noted.
Re:Not impressed (Score:3, Informative)
the default is "if not in address book and it's SPAM" send to SPAM folder.
you should be able to add a properity to that rule that says
"if not in address book and FROM: doesn't contiain XYX.COM and it's SPAM" send to SPAM folder
you just add the properities before the SPAM one.
Emacs! (Score:4, Interesting)
This is something that Emacs has in the GNUS client, you score emails up and down and it starts adding filtering rules. Using LISP you could extend this to do some pretty funky moderating.
Every problem is reducable to a previously solved problem or by definition is unsolveable - Church Turing Thesis.
The ultimate filters (Score:5, Insightful)
SpamCop! (Score:3, Insightful)
If using SpamCop, there should be a way to still show the site's banners, because they deserve to get paid for their bandwidth I'm using up.
I'd love to just be able to right-click on a message and report it to the various abuse/postmaster accounts without having to copy my whole message plus headers, and pasting such into their web form. SpamCop seems to be pretty good at tracing the origins of messages, so I'd love to be able to leverage that sort of functionality.
Hmm, my spam experiences (Score:5, Interesting)
Spam is such a horrible thing though. I work at a webhosting company. Im the one that has to track down the site with the old formmail.pl, removing 'aol.com' and 'yahoo.com' from the hosts to relay for, trying to find out who the hell added them so I can murder them. Im the one clearing out the mail queue with 100,000 mails. Im the one clearing the mail queues of people who thought it was a good idea to check the 'open relay' option in plesk. Im the one that has to deal with people bitching about how their mail isnt working or didnt get through.
Just the other day, I had a raq2 where someone had apparantly put yahoo.com and excite.com in the hosts to relay for. Yay! Thats what attracted the spammers. Now I get a request every second to send mail to 50 people at once. Now that I've removed them, none of them are getting through. But its a raq2, 133 mhz. It has to go through all 50 addresses and say 'relaying denied' and log it. It cant keep up! syslogd is taking up all the cpu and logging things from hours ago because its behind. Quickly, sendmail quits listening on port 25 (but the spam attempts keep coming somehow).
So I get the idea to block their ips, they seem to be using the same ips. But oh guess what, they're using open proxies and have about 400 ips. Well, I did this for about 5 hours, writing scripts to grab the repeated ips out of the maillog, adding them all to my sendmail access lists. Now every time they try to send mail, it blocks them instead of saying relaying denied 50 times for each request. But a minute later, I get a few new ips and it starts all over again. I have an access list about 6 pages long. Its doing ok, blocking about 90% of them, but every once in a while, they get a new ip and sendmail is brought to a stop.
Oh yeah, and my
So oh well, mail is getting lost every day on this server and its been renderred horribly slow for its users.. just because some moron noticed it would send some emails for him and started up his scripts.
Spam causes so many problems on the server level. Its what is making mail an unreliable service. I could care less about spam filters on my mail client. These are the things that make spam evil!
Real spam control.. (Score:3, Interesting)
.. should start at the server preventing the offending mail from ever coming into the network in the first place.
Not that localized spam filters are a bad thing (they aren't!) but refusing connections from known spammer IPs and the proper use of blacklists would cut down on a lot of the email traffic. Once the spam is in your inbox, its just an annoyance to you. The cost to the net has already been incurred.
It learns from the spam you receive... (Score:5, Funny)
Spam filters should bust the spammers, also. (Score:5, Interesting)
Software that only does mail filtering encourages spammers. The technically knowledgeable people don't get spam, so they stop worrying about it.
All mail filters should also use a service like SpamCop [spamcop.net], so that the spammers lose their internet service accounts as the spam is filtered.
I send Spamcop all my spam. Spamcop analyzes it automatically and sends a message to the Internet Service Provider. I use the free Reporting only [spamcop.net] service.
But will it be in Evolution? (Score:4, Informative)
I tried to find out if the Evolution dev team was going to do this. The only thread I could find on the topic is here:
http://lists.helixcode.com/archives/public/evolut
Doesn't look like it's part of their vision.
My Problem with Mozilla sorta OT (Score:3, Insightful)
I tried to find some documentation on how to acheive this, however, there was none to be found. Does anyone know how to do this, the I can use Mozilla's mail, rather than the flaky mail app that comes with OSX.
Re:My Problem with Mozilla sorta OT (Score:3, Informative)
As for email/news clients, there are two, I believe. Thunderbird [mozillazine.org] and Minotaur [mozilla.org]. Neither are out at all yet to use.
tmda.net? (Score:3, Interesting)
Essentially, it throws the parsing problem right back in the spammer's faces: They must answer a fuzzy logic question in order to get into your inbox once and for all. It is similar to challenge/response routines in network connection code to prevent spoofing. The most interesting part from the intro:
Bayesian filters to me, seem to work if you are a dull person without many changes in your life. For ex, if you constantly get spams with the word Madam in it and you later on get a sex change, you will need to recalibrate your filters. (Probably not the most pressing thing on your mind, so you'd lose a few authentic mails.)
Just some thoughts.
Sort by Spam Probability (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems too many people distrust spam filters because of the chance of accidentally blocking an important legitimate message as if it were spam.
Many spam filters are strictly binary: a message is either spam, or not spam. This is not ideal, because "gray area" messages - between these two extremes - will likely not be sorted correctly.
I propose adding a new sort option to email clients.
Sort by Spam Probability
This would be an additional field that can be displayed in a message list, similiar to "To", "From", "Subject", and the like. Like the article [paulgraham.com], probabilities would range from 99% (almost certain spam) to 1% (most likely an innocent message). Notice that 100% accuracy either way is not claimed.
This way, the user can see up front the messages that are most likely not spam. The spam messages will be relegated to the bottom of the list, possibly colored to indicate their likelihood of being spam. If there is a message in the "gray area", it will most likely appear in the list between the legitimate messages and the spam, so the user will have a chance to see the message and make a decision, without the message being lost in the shuffle.
This would be a great feature. I hope this gets into Mozilla's mail client.
(BTW, another feature that would be great to see in mail clients would be datestamping of the actual time the message was downloaded. Many spammers, and innocent people with misconfigured clocks, send emails with wild dates that are not to be trusted. You can see this in yearly archives of GNU "mailman" mailing lists! Datestamping emails as they are downloaded will also keep mailboxes in order when sorted by date, as newly arrived messages will always be at the bottom, instead of being scattered throughout the inbox. But sorting by spam probability will probably become more popular than sorting by date....)
Bayes filters can't adapt to text in images (Score:4, Insightful)
As a popfile user, I'm quite impressed with the catch rate possible with bayes theorem spam filters, however I suspect this will decrease in effectiveness over the long term.
Spammers are likely to respond to filters like this by encoding text in ways the filters can't read but humans can (eg having a .gif file of the text, loaded by a HTML statement in the message).
Statistical filters would need to have some kind of built in OCR routine before it could be effective against that trick, and some respectible mailing lists are using images as well, so you can't just filter all mails with images attatched.
In the long term, therefore, I suspect that filters that use a network database of spam will be more successful.
brain fart... block HTML in e-mail? (Score:3, Insightful)
Just thought of this now... but it seems like almost all spam these days contains a whole bunch of HTML tags. Maybe someone should write a server plugin to instantly reject all mail containing , instantly adding the sending IP to a iptables DROP rule.
There's little legitimate e-mail with tables, unless you count paypal, datek, and travelocity news and that kind of crap. But we could always add a list of "good" IPs.
I know there are server solutions, but all make me a bit queasy. I just want something that will detect funky activity on the fly and instantly deny all access to that IP.
My Bayesian Adventures (Score:3, Insightful)
I know I've got a particularily difficult task for this filtering technique; I get an awful lot of spam that comes in every day (~100 messages per 24 hour period), some of it I actually want (I run an underground music site, and in some cases I subscribe to opt-in lists that result in something that looks like spam), the rest I could care less about.
My results have been decent for the most part; 100% of my spam ends up in my Spam folder, however there is a handful of messages that I wish to keep that end up there as well.. For the most part they are the above-mentioned 'borderline' pieces of spam (which I have been careful to put aside and have indexed by popfile anyway), I can only hope that more time and samples will yield better results. I was however surprised to find that some of the e-mails I was getting from friends were falling in to the Spam mailbox anyway; after taking a closer look, I can see why, they use an awful lot of otherwise unmentionable words - but my suspicion that I haven't gotten enough of these 'good-emails-with-bad-words' to make the filtering truly effective.
Nonetheless, it is nice to have all of my spams seemingly guaranteed to drop in to my "Spam" folder, but my usual task of manually filtering messages that made it past my existing filters in to my Spam folder has been replaced with a different (albeit quicker) task; taking messages out of my spam folder and putting them where they really belong.
Bottom-line: I still have to visually scan through my mail for legitimate messages amongst the thicket of items informing me about the exciting exploits of women at the farm, wonderful business opportunities from Nigeria and suggestions that I should buy Viagra by the boatload.. all this despite having collected a well organized and rather large collection of spam/non-spam mails. I'll stick with it for a while as I'd like to try it out and give it a proper chance, but I suspect that if you're in a similar situation then you should be prepared to tough it out..
Suggested Feature: "Block Plugins from This Site" (Score:3, Insightful)
A lot of ad companies are now using really annoying flash. Blocking images doesn't stop these.
Re:didn't k5 already run a story on this? (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, and your point is? Hint: Slashdot gets most of it's stories from elsewhere.
Re:MSN 8 rules, Mozilla Sucks (Score:3, Funny)
s/Microsoft/Open Source/
Re:MSN 8 rules, Mozilla Sucks (Score:2)
Besides the obvious fact that Mozilla costs $0 per month, you mean?
Re:I just started up popfile (Score:2, Informative)
The fun thing is when it works on its own, like when you get a message from a subscribed list that it has never seen before and it knows that it ISN'T spam.
With popfile working so well I'm not in a hurry to have Bayesian filters built into the mail client.
Has anybody tried sharing the history data between Windows and Linux clients on a dual boot machine?
No, too obvious (Score:2)
Not enough (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Its still too slow... (Score:3, Informative)
The good news is, for those inclined to sacrifice system performance for quick browser load times, is that this option is also available in Mozilla...Look under "Preferences...Advanced" for the Quick-launch option.