Topic: Free and working spam filter??

[larry.p]

Hi all.

I am wondering if any of you use any spam filter software that was free and is now working. I saw junkfilter, but the company that makes it for mitel charges $95 for it. I just want to know if there is one out there that works under e-smith 5.5 and is GPL (doesn't have to be part of the web interface, I'll administer it through the console if need be).

Any thoughts or pointers?

[chris meredith]

Check this thread:
http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=14458.msg55101#msg55101

I run SpamAssassin on several boxes and it works fairly well.

http://us.spamassassin.org/doc.html

[larry.p]

Thanks Chris. I read the thread and I may try it, although it seems like alot of people are having trouble getting it configured. Hmmmm, anything easier? I'm a moderate Linux user and this will be my third install of e-smith, however, I hardly ever have to modify the box for the client.

[Bill Talcott]

I'm working on getting Vipul's Razor (http://razor.sourceforge.net) working. It's the server part of Cloudmark's Outlook addon... I don't seem to be having much luck though. Someone said that you just have to follow the howto, but it was making me update a bunch of stuff in order to do the stuff I needed to get Razor working, and it didn't seem to be working. I'm not familiar enough with Linux yet to figure out exactly what was and should have been going on.

Razor creates a signature of each spam, and distributes the signatures on their network. When you get an email matching that signature, it flags it as spam. Spam Assassin looks for key spam-like phrases in emails, from what I've read. Each method has its pros and cons, but people were saying that SA was blocking their anti-spam development emails, because they contained those phrases...

[Rich Lafferty]

Bill Talcott wrote:
>
> Each method has its pros and cons, but people were saying that SA
> was blocking their anti-spam development emails, because they
> contained those phrases...

You'd think people developing antispam software would know to disable
their antispam filters for a mailing list discussing antispam filters.

Spamassassin's default rules are exactly that, a default -- you're able to
and maybe even expected to tweak individual rules, the values assigned
to default rules, and the overall threshold to fit with the mail you receive.
It also uses auto-whitelisting and GA to modify its own rules to fit the
sort of mail you receive.

For instance, all of the mail I get through RT has an In-Reply-To header,
because RT always adds it -- but that doesn't stop people sending spam
through RT. So I added a rule with a penalty of 2.0 for a message from RT,
which cancels out the -2.0 score an In-Reply-To header gives.

Cheers,

--Rich

[stephen noble]

there are many free spam filters

see dungog.net/sme/files for two that i've made into rpms
junkfilter and tmda.

getting them to work
and keeping them current is up to you

if you want to take advantage of the few hundred hours i've put into making them easy to setup and for users to maintain that's also your choice

regards
stephen noble
dungog.net/sme

[Bill Talcott]

Rich Lafferty wrote:
>
> Bill Talcott wrote:
> >
> > Each method has its pros and cons, but people were saying
> that SA
> > was blocking their anti-spam development emails, because they
> > contained those phrases...
>
> You'd think people developing antispam software would know to
> disable
> their antispam filters for a mailing list discussing antispam
> filters.

I agree. It was more to point out that SA simply checks against rules. If an email contains those specific phrases or whatever, it gets treated as spam. It's a simple "dumb" filtering program (which can be set up to do some very complex things if the rules are set properly).

Razor creates a unique signature for each email. Users then submit a vote for that email (the signature, actually) as spam or not spam. As users submit more "correct" votes, their votes get more weight. If 100 people mark something as spam, and the sender marks it as not spam, it's still listed as spam, and the spammer's subsequent ratings carry less weight. It's a very neat system, but it does require user input to work properly (as opposed to just have a yes/no set of filters). The only way around it would be to get more people with higher trust ratings to vote something as not spam.

A lot of people are using both, as each will catch ones the other misses. Just like everything else, redundancy is good.

I was going to try to make a fancy setup where users could forward messages to spam@domain.com or notspam@domain.com to vote or unvote a message. However, I think it would probably just confuse these users, so I'll probably just go with the checking, and let them move the message back if it's detected as spam or delete it if it's missed.

[larry.p]

Thanks Stephen, you're just what I've been looking for...Thank you SOOO much!!!

[Shad Lords]

Bill I believe you are mistaken,

If Spam Assassin is configured correctly it will do a lot more then just check for phrases.  It is a lot more then a dumb program.  I have it configured on my server and it checks RBL lists, check the Razor database, checks for known phrases, checks white and black lists.  All of these things are then taken into consideration to give it a score.  If that score is above a certain threshold then it is considered spam.

check out the main page for spamassassin:

http://www.spamassassin.org

Right there on the front page it states that it does header analysis, text analysis, blacklists (including RBL type lists), and Vipul's Razor.

-Shad

[James Redfern]

stephen noble wrote:
>
> there are many free spam filters
>
> see dungog.net/sme/files for two that i've made into rpms
> junkfilter and tmda.

Stephen, I don't mean to put you down for all the good work you do and release under GPL, but have I got something wrong about the Dungog release of TDMA?  The TDMA release is 'free', but requires the proprietary dungog.'Net rpms' to be paid-for before it will work… or, have I got something wrong?

JR.

[Steve]

http://assp.sourceforge.net/

[James Redfern]

I take it this is a pointer to a site which in effect, tells you how it runs on and that it was written for a Win32 platform.  My question was generally about a Linux issue and specifically to do with an e-smith implementation.

JR.

[Steve]

runs on linux, runs on e-smith

of 20,306 email its taken out 3,364 spams in 80 days. Its a set and forget system and works really well.

[James Redfern]

You are missing the point entirely of course, but I imagine you knew that already. I'd like to say thanks for the help... but there was none.

JR.

[Steve]

The question was for a free and working spam filter - thats what i gave you. It does what it says on the tin 100% on linux or win32. I use it on e-smith as do others

Whilst it wont install itself, it wasnt that difficult for a windows old timer/linux newbie like me to install.

Sorry i bothered to try and help