[lug] Stopping the New Generation of Spam

[Philip Cooper]

On Sun, Dec 03, 2006 at 12:19:02PM -0700, Bill Thoen wrote:
> Over the last 2-3 months I've been getting a *lot* more spam than ever
> before and Spamassassin doesn't seem to be reacting fast enough ....

> How are people dealing with this new onslaught? What sort of filtering or
> tools work these days? ...

OK  I've gone through the previous postings and didn't see my solution
so here goes my $.02 worth.

I would suggest you look into a statistical text classification scheme
The two systems in heavy use for spam are:
http://crm114.sourceforge.net/
http://dspam.nuclearelephant.com/
I am a user of CRM114 and have seen no degradation of performance.  I
know Chris Riddoch and s couple of other LUG members have used it so I
am surprised it has not been mentioned yet.

CRM114 is no pleasure to install but it it fast.  DSPAM has a mysql
backend and a web front-end but I miss neither.  I have setup a
forwarding of my mail to gmail to compare accuracy.  After a couple of
days of training, I was better off than ever before and after a couple
of weeks I was doing better than the geniuses at google (story attacks
seem to trip them up occasionally).

The "Ending Spam" book (see the dspam site) is an excellent
description of why this is *THE* way to filter spam.  Using things like
spamassassin or even SPF in front of CRM114 or dspam can actually hurt
performance.  One install and you are done.  No multi-layered approach
or spamassassin style arms race with the spammers.  

YMMV but for me...It just works.

-- 
Phil Cooper