[Boulder.pm] meeting/topic?

[lz]

Hello Walter,

Have you checked out MailWasher. Been using it a week now
and am impressed. It dl's just headers then you pick the
ones to blacklist and send a 'bounce' saying 'unknown user'
all from the isp server. The bounce should get one off spam
lists, little by little, as they are cleaned.

I've noticed a reduction from 20-25% down to about 5%.

Lots more to it. Info at:
http://www.mailwasher.net/

Only for windoz, if that's not for you then maybe you can
get some ideas from it for your pearl program. (to stay on
topic)

zya

Historians believe that on Tuesday, November 12, 2002 Walter
Pienciak wrote and made these points on the subject of
"[Boulder.pm] meeting/topic?":


> Hi,

> I enjoyed Rob's presentation on Extreme Programming last time.

> I've been spending too much time thinking about spam and how to
> deal with it.  Once upon a time, I was happy to have everything
> in one mailbox, and I'd just look at the subject lines.

> Then the volume of mail rose as everyone started to use it, and
> I fired up procmail to sort into folders and to tag some of the
> remaining subject lines for make visual ID easier.

> Then the spam started.

> procmail started getting unwieldy, so I rolled my own basic
> pattern-matching filtering program using Mail::Audit.  But when
> spammers can cost-effectively purchase a new domain for each spam
> run, pattern-matching based on domain names becomes, uh, "less
> effective."

> So I move to a heuristics-based approach, with SpamAssassin.
> Which works really well.  But there's still some spam that sneaks
> in under the radar, so I look at that, add custom rules . . .
> And still some sneaks in, more than I want, and I realize that if
> *I* were a smart spammer, I'd have a copy of SpamAssassin myself,
> and would tweak the wording on my e-mails so that it didn't rise
> above the default spam threshold with the default settings.

> Huh.

> So I've been checking out the Bayesian approaches lately.
> Interesting, and it made me get out the encyclopedia, since I
> never did take none o' them statistic classes in school.

> A LOT of these programs are written in Perl.  And so there's
> the hook I need to make this on topic for the group.

> Who would be interested in getting together for a meeting
> centered around spam and the programs used to detect it?
> Pros/cons of each, and if someone was feeling particularly academic
> or informed about a program, they could give an intro to the
> "interesting stuff" behind the mechanism -- e.g., Bayesian filtering.

> Walter

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-- 
Best regards,