[pmmail-list] Spam filtering - popfile et al

[Dave Saville]

On Sat, 22 Mar 2003 06:00:26 -0600 (CST), Maynard Riley wrote:

>Hi Dave,
>
>I'll take this opportunity to say [again] how much I appreciate Luko's
>code for checking RBLs with PMMail.
>[http://www.willms-edv.de/freesoft/pmmail/blacklist.zip]
>
>I'll add a comment that there are several valid reasons why NOT to
>filter on content, which is what the baysean tools do. Content
>filtering is frought with error. Spam is not about content. The same
>content may be spam to you and joy to another. Reading and analyzing
>all the body content (and attachments) is considerably more effort than
>just analyzing headers. No need for bolus; no need for maintenance
>tuning, ....
>
>The good news is that the RBLs do a darn fine job of catching 95% of
>the spam with fewer false positives than content filters.

Hmmm, do you have any more addresses to add to the list it comes
with? 

I am not impressed. I installed it by hacking the install script - it
assumes a pmmail/2 folder name and then does a case sensitive check
that it got there. It also fails to do a cross drive install.

Having got it installed, I turned it into a manual filter that only
issued the warn user on confirmed and ran it down my spam folder
which has 168 messages. It only popped up about three or four
messages and only logged 68 of them as "Spam Warning" - the other 90
odd it passed.  That's only 42% detection.

The problem with this approach, compounded by pmmail filtering, is
that what one would really like to do is do more than one check on
the return from the script. Delete if confirmed, move if suspect etc.
But as far as I know you can only do the one test with the program
tag - and you don't want to be running it more than once per message.

-- 
Regards

Dave Saville
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