[Boulder.pm] meeting/topic?

Rob Nagler nagler at bivio.biz
Tue Nov 12 12:39:59 CST 2002


Walter Pienciak writes:
> 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.

Yes, but it is hard to do.  My latest venture (assurancesys.com) does
exactly this, and even translates SpamAssassin's regex's to English.
(That was an interesting project in itself. :)  We also do delivery
and blacklist monitoring for interactive marketers.

> 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.

Bayesian is cool stuff, and essentially unbreakable.  Spam was
originally repeated unsolicited email.  Now, people opt-in, and still
call it spam.  The Bayesian approach allows you to define "unwanted"
email tailored to your approach.  I think it will work best, but can't
be installed for an entire site.

If you want site solutions, you may want to go with an ASP like
brightmail.com.  Apparently brightmail has a very low false positive
rate (like near zero), which is the biggest danger with site-wide
filters.

As to a meeting topic, sounds good to me.

Rob





More information about the Boulder-pm mailing list