Re: Which spam filter do you use?
On 05.10.2007 (02:08), Kyle Wheeler wrote:
> On Friday, October 5 at 08:06 AM, quoth M. Fioretti:
> >Besides some MTA-level filtering, I am using bogo instead of
> >spamassassin because of one simple reason: lack of maintenance.
> >
> >I've read several times that SA rules must be constantly updated and
> >added, otherwise they get half-useless every few weeks. Is this still
> >true?
>
> Bah; SpamAssassin is the swiss-army-knife of spam filters. It includes
> a bayesian filter (not to mention things like razor and dcc, which are
> constantly up-to-date), and as such, does not require updating the
> rules. Updating the rules can *help*, but it is not required to
> continue functioning at a reasonably high level.
>
> The real criticism I'd level against SpamAssassin as compared to
> bogofilter is that SpamAssassin's bayesian classifier is relatively
> simple. To my knowledge, it doesn't tokenize word-pairs and phrases,
> but just single words; thus, something that uses more advanced
> bayesian techniques (I presume bogofilter fits this description?) may
> well beat it at that particular game---which is where updating the
> rules can help as a compensating factor. It's not like a virus-scanner
> where an out-of-date database is worthless.
So this does in fact mean that without that extra time tending the
rules, SA may actually let more spam through?
It's not that I'm dissatisfied with my current situation. My #1
concern is actually with false negatives; I've since long given up
browsing through the CapturedSpam folder to check for them before I
delete everything. I haven't had any complaints from people who think
I neglect them (unless the complaints also end up in the filter...),
but in one comparison I read, it seemed that SA had absolutely 0 of
that, whereas bogo might have one or two (out of I don't remember how
many thousand).
All in all, it may not be such a bad thing; if there IS some mail I
haven't answered but should have, I can always say "sorry, never got
your mail, it must have been trapped in the filter." I'd hate to lose
that excuse... :-)
eyolf
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