There are currently three approaches to spam filtering:
These are usually easy to setup, but you need to update the rules on a regular basis, just like virus detecting software…
You can maintain your own blacklists, or you can use published blacklists from the net.
Paul Graham has written an article on spam filtering based on statistics. You might want to try it yourself. The basics are all there (and need more work).
Christopher Browne’s pages also have a general reference list for this method: http://cbbrowne.com/info/ipfilter.html
There are a few other research paper links at teledyN[2].
The external ifile program by Jason Rennie can also be used within procmail.
ifile is totally MUA-independant. it keeps a database in ASCII text-format, tallies infrequently and too often occuring words and can be customized flexibly to use different lexers or bitmaps instead of frequencies. it is slightly optimized for usenet-postings and mail, and comes with integration scripts for MH-like readers. jason rennie and a few others are still actively developing it, a mailinglist is available as well as tools written by users. after priming/training it with a maybe 100 messages you can easily achieve an accuracy of over 99%. – ClemensFischer
This number is problematic: Is this for false negatives, or false positives, or both? ifile categorises mail. Does the number mean that 1% of all mails ends up in the wrong folder? – AlexSchroeder
NathanWilliams? said on the Gnus mailing list that he uses ifile with Gnus and replaced 250 lines of nnmail-split-fancy rules with one ifile invocation. He used a setup from JeremyBrown?, available here:
My experience has been in line with the original ifile paper – for general- purpose classification, it’s right about 85% of the time; that’s a little too low for my tastes. However, it’s spectacularly good at spam identification, and might make a nice fallback classifier when your hand-written split rules don’t match. Startup overhead right now is painfully high, but hopefully that will get fixed soon -- jhbrown
I will second that experience. I have it set now as the first line of defence and the false-positives mean I have to sift the spam folder anyway — I plan to switch to Jeremy’s GNUS method as it makes much more sense to use this after SpamAssassin? and the regular split rules have given up. – garym
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/software.html#spamoracle
A Bayesian spam filter written in ObjectiveCaml by Xavier Leroy. It is very fast and understand MIME attachments. Spam Oracle works by adding an header “X-Spam:” followed by “yes”, “no” or “unknown” plus additional details to each message. Easy to be setup in a MUA independent mannere using procmail or directly in Gnus with nnmail-split-methods.