[Mimedefang] Subject block - good success - Anyone else trying it?

Kevin A. McGrail kmcgrail at pccc.com
Mon Jul 18 11:29:24 EDT 2005


In defense of Ken's subject-blocking system, my personal experience with
Bayesian systems for large user bases has been subpar.  In short, the
benefits are severely outweighed by the server load.  Of course, this is
speaking about SpamAssassin's current Bayesian implementation.

I know that CanIT has a much better Bayesian implementation with many many
tweaks to make the Bayesian systems less intensive on the server but I've
currently disabled our main server with Bayes and been working on tweaks in
an anti-spam world without Bayes.

Overall, I'm also seeing more gibberish emails, Bayesian poisoning, more cut
and pasting of Guggenheim projects, and SPAMs that have a limited
possibility of being blocked based on pure content, etc.

Synopsis: I'm not the Bayesian fan I once was.  I am however a huge SURBL
and similar URI DB proponent.  When it boils down to it, the spammers want
to get a link in the email that works and databases of those links are going
to be the most effective long-term block.  The second most effective scoring
for spam *and* for ham has been pathway analysis like relay.

However, as a major con against Ken's system, why spammers aren't using
truly random but non-gibberish, subject generators is beyond me.


Also, thanks to a friend, I was able to directly contact one of the 8
postmasters for AOL who approved our servers for whitelist in about 3
minutes.  Now we just have to wait 32 more hours for the whitelist to go
into effect...

Thanks again to all those with ideas and help!

Regards,
KAM


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Cormack, Ken" <Ken.Cormack at roadway.com>
To: <mimedefang at lists.roaringpenguin.com>
Sent: Monday, July 18, 2005 10:37 AM
Subject: RE: [Mimedefang] Subject block - good success - Anyone else trying
it?


> Would a Bayes analyzer deal with a spammer's efforts to "personalize" or
> vary a subject line, with things such as:
>
> "Hey Jill at foo.com, claim your dream vacation - 07/15/05"
> "Hey Pete at foo.com, claim your dream vacation - #GGFS85F"




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