Re: [Evolution] Built-in spam filtering?

[Jim Frost <jimf frostbytes com>]

On Thu, 2003-01-02 at 18:13, guenther wrote:
> If you don't control the server, get your own. ;)

I do have my own for personal use.  Cannot have my own for corporate
use, don't have the choice.

> I know, you mentioned spamassassin, but have you really
> considered it?

Of course I did.  It has about a 90% success rate and more than a 1%
false positive rate and requires me to diligently keep up the rule
base.  Now, 90% success would be great, but 1% false is a killer.  That
means I'll see like five or ten falses a day, which means I'll be
constantly going through the filtered mail, which defeats the purpose.

Statistical techniques are exceeding 99% accuracy with false positives
of 0.1% or less, and maintenance is a matter of stuffing new spam into
the database.

I want statistical, thanks.

> And you never have to wait for new mail to get sucked from the POP3
> server.

What pop3 server?  Everything I use is imap, which is one reason that
it's hard to use a lot of the existing bayesian tools.

> Setting up an IMAP server on my local machine was only about an rpm
> install on my Mandrake 9.0 system here. (That is, 400 km away from here,
> cause I'm still with my family for holiday... ;)
>
> For me, it is the perfect solution. Maybe it can be useful for you, too.

I have been running my own imap server since 1997.  Started with Cyrus
(which was great), then UW imapd since Cyrus didn't coexist well with
Red Hat 6 (UW imapd sucks sucks sucks and yet is the standard on Linux
systems) and these days I'm running courier imap on BSD (which is really
great).

So, running my own server does work with personal mail although, as I
said, it's not a straightforward drop-in to put in most of the server
based filters.  Finding the time to figure out what I need to do has
been problematic.  And, even with that done, I still have to deal with
the corporate spam residing on servers I do not and cannot control.

Probably 99% of Evolution's users don't run their own servers and would
benefit from this kind of thing even if you personally don't, and a hell
of a lot of people would prefer not to be screwing around with procmail
just to get rid of spam.

> (spamassassin has AFAIK even some server based spam detection, not only
> their rules based.)

Yea, it does, but that's like using a nuke to kill rodents.

jim