The recent spate of messages from those trying to unsubscribe reminds me that about 2/3 of everything I get via e-mail—even with an academic address—is spam. I’ve got my “rules” set up so as to try to catch some of this: --if the subject line contains certain keywords, e.g., “market,” “drugs,” “investment,” “penis,” “casino,” then it goes into my trash box. --if the from line contains “admin,” then it goes in the trash box --if the “to” says “undisclosed recipients,” etc. I’m wondering whether others have had success with similar rules, as opposed to installing spam-killing software (and as for that, how well does it work, when spammers garble key words so as to avoid screening, e.g., Vi*ag*kra or other combinations). Gary Thompson
Gary Thompson wrote:
The recent spate of messages from those trying to unsubscribe reminds me that about 2/3 of everything I get via e-mail—even with an academic address—is spam. I’ve got my “rules” set up so as to try to catch some of this:
Since you talk about "rules" I suppose you're using Microsoft Outlook (Express).
--if the subject line contains certain keywords, e.g., “market,” “drugs,” “investment,” “penis,” “casino,” then it goes into my trash box. --if the from line contains “admin,” then it goes in the trash box --if the “to” says “undisclosed recipients,” etc.
I’m wondering whether others have had success with similar rules, as opposed to installing spam-killing software (and as for that, how well does it work, when spammers garble key words so as to avoid screening, e.g., Vi*ag*kra or other combinations).
It helps a little... but unless your e-mail client lets you write sophisticated regular expressions into the rules (which Outlook doesn't afaik), you quickly end up with countless not terribly effective rules. I tried this too before our department admins installed server side spam filtering on the Exchange server. One of the reasons that 'professional' spam fighters have moved beyond 'mere' rule based filtering is that because spamfilters have to be made available to the public, dedicated spammers will quickly find ways around static rules for filtering spam. A Bayesian spamfilter is a more dynamic type of filter that goes through a learning period in which you tell it which messages are spam and which messages are ham. It classifies a number of characteristics of these messages and depending on their statistical occurrence in either category incoming messages are sorted into either the spam or the ham category. Mozilla based e-mail clients such as the Mozilla Suite and Thunderbird <http://mozilla.org> contain bayesian filters. Personally I'm very pleased with the end result. I haven't seen a spam message up close for a long while and I haven't had any false positives after a rather short training period. The Mozilla based clients support both POP and IMAP. But, if you just have to use Outlook to access your department's Exchange server and your department admins refuse to install spamfiltering on the server, you can run a bayesian filter in your own Outlook install (if they've given you enough permissions to install it). Have a look at Spambayes <http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/> Eventually I guess we'll see some sort of authentication system that makes e-mail traceable. For the moment I just try to keep my personal, non-list related e-mail addresses off the web and out of newsgroups. For that kind of use I set up free throw-away accounts that I use for a couple of months untill they become useless. HTH Frank. -- My Personal Portal (TM) http://fragment.nl/
There's another side effect to a strict set of filtering rules: you might make it too hard for email that you'd like to get thru. From the outside world, I deal with academic email addresses where incoming email is "scored". If I want to be sure an email gets thru, I have to repeatedly use words like "Professor" or the name of the school to raise my mail's score in case a pic or some content might have somehow lowered its score. I make the effort; I wonder how many others quit trying to communicate with academicians inside these walls. I have found in non-email contacts that some professors are not aware of the details of their school filters. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Frank Schaap" <architext@fragment.nl> To: <air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Sent: Tuesday, August 17, 2004 8:03 AM Subject: Re: [Air-l] screening out spam Gary Thompson wrote:
The recent spate of messages from those trying to unsubscribe reminds me that about 2/3 of everything I get via e-mail—even with an academic address—is spam. I’ve got my “rules” set up so as to try to catch some of this:
Since you talk about "rules" I suppose you're using Microsoft Outlook (Express).
--if the subject line contains certain keywords, e.g., “market,” “drugs,” “investment,” “penis,” “casino,” then it goes into my trash box. --if the from line contains “admin,” then it goes in the trash box --if the “to” says “undisclosed recipients,” etc.
I’m wondering whether others have had success with similar rules, as opposed to installing spam-killing software (and as for that, how well does it work, when spammers garble key words so as to avoid screening, e.g., Vi*ag*kra or other combinations).
It helps a little... but unless your e-mail client lets you write sophisticated regular expressions into the rules (which Outlook doesn't afaik), you quickly end up with countless not terribly effective rules. I tried this too before our department admins installed server side spam filtering on the Exchange server. One of the reasons that 'professional' spam fighters have moved beyond 'mere' rule based filtering is that because spamfilters have to be made available to the public, dedicated spammers will quickly find ways around static rules for filtering spam. A Bayesian spamfilter is a more dynamic type of filter that goes through a learning period in which you tell it which messages are spam and which messages are ham. It classifies a number of characteristics of these messages and depending on their statistical occurrence in either category incoming messages are sorted into either the spam or the ham category. Mozilla based e-mail clients such as the Mozilla Suite and Thunderbird <http://mozilla.org> contain bayesian filters. Personally I'm very pleased with the end result. I haven't seen a spam message up close for a long while and I haven't had any false positives after a rather short training period. The Mozilla based clients support both POP and IMAP. But, if you just have to use Outlook to access your department's Exchange server and your department admins refuse to install spamfiltering on the server, you can run a bayesian filter in your own Outlook install (if they've given you enough permissions to install it). Have a look at Spambayes <http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/> Eventually I guess we'll see some sort of authentication system that makes e-mail traceable. For the moment I just try to keep my personal, non-list related e-mail addresses off the web and out of newsgroups. For that kind of use I set up free throw-away accounts that I use for a couple of months untill they become useless. HTH Frank. -- My Personal Portal (TM) http://fragment.nl/ _______________________________________________ Air-l-aoir.org mailing list Air-l-aoir.org@listserv.aoir.org http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
I use spamassassin and really am pleased with the result. I reckon I get about 10 spam in my inbox a week (and maybe 1 false positive a month). I have a unix account and use fetchmail to drag all my email to the one account on the unix box. As it comes in it is filtered by spamassassin and, using procmail, put into a Spam IMAP folder. I then access the email by IMAP client and webmail and it is all in the same folders. Talk to whomever does your mailserver and urge them to use at least some spam-filtering software. The free stuff works just as well as the expensive stuff. OUr mailserver also uses the http://www.spamhaus.org/ blacklist which is intended to identify IP addresses of know spammers but also home machines that are acting like they have mailing-viruses installed. That bounces a lot of mail but I have never had a false positive with it (and I was very careful at first to check all the bounces). The bottom line is that you have to go collaborative with this stuff can't fight them alone. --J On Aug 17, 2004, at 8:24 AM, Tom Diffenbach wrote:
There's another side effect to a strict set of filtering rules: you might make it too hard for email that you'd like to get thru. From the outside world, I deal with academic email addresses where incoming email is "scored". If I want to be sure an email gets thru, I have to repeatedly use words like "Professor" or the name of the school to raise my mail's score in case a pic or some content might have somehow lowered its score. I make the effort; I wonder how many others quit trying to communicate with academicians inside these walls. I have found in non-email contacts that some professors are not aware of the details of their school filters.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Frank Schaap" <architext@fragment.nl> To: <air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Sent: Tuesday, August 17, 2004 8:03 AM Subject: Re: [Air-l] screening out spam
Gary Thompson wrote:
The recent spate of messages from those trying to unsubscribe reminds me that about 2/3 of everything I get via e-mail—even with an academic address—is spam. I’ve got my “rules” set up so as to try to catch some of this:
Since you talk about "rules" I suppose you're using Microsoft Outlook (Express).
--if the subject line contains certain keywords, e.g., “market,” “drugs,” “investment,” “penis,” “casino,” then it goes into my trash box. --if the from line contains “admin,” then it goes in the trash box --if the “to” says “undisclosed recipients,” etc.
I’m wondering whether others have had success with similar rules, as opposed to installing spam-killing software (and as for that, how well does it work, when spammers garble key words so as to avoid screening, e.g., Vi*ag*kra or other combinations).
It helps a little... but unless your e-mail client lets you write sophisticated regular expressions into the rules (which Outlook doesn't afaik), you quickly end up with countless not terribly effective rules. I tried this too before our department admins installed server side spam filtering on the Exchange server.
One of the reasons that 'professional' spam fighters have moved beyond 'mere' rule based filtering is that because spamfilters have to be made available to the public, dedicated spammers will quickly find ways around static rules for filtering spam.
A Bayesian spamfilter is a more dynamic type of filter that goes through a learning period in which you tell it which messages are spam and which messages are ham. It classifies a number of characteristics of these messages and depending on their statistical occurrence in either category incoming messages are sorted into either the spam or the ham category.
Mozilla based e-mail clients such as the Mozilla Suite and Thunderbird <http://mozilla.org> contain bayesian filters. Personally I'm very pleased with the end result. I haven't seen a spam message up close for a long while and I haven't had any false positives after a rather short training period. The Mozilla based clients support both POP and IMAP.
But, if you just have to use Outlook to access your department's Exchange server and your department admins refuse to install spamfiltering on the server, you can run a bayesian filter in your own Outlook install (if they've given you enough permissions to install it). Have a look at Spambayes <http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/>
Eventually I guess we'll see some sort of authentication system that makes e-mail traceable. For the moment I just try to keep my personal, non-list related e-mail addresses off the web and out of newsgroups. For that kind of use I set up free throw-away accounts that I use for a couple of months untill they become useless.
HTH
Frank.
-- My Personal Portal (TM) http://fragment.nl/
_______________________________________________ Air-l-aoir.org mailing list Air-l-aoir.org@listserv.aoir.org http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
_______________________________________________ Air-l-aoir.org mailing list Air-l-aoir.org@listserv.aoir.org http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Well I do it like this: spam filter on our server does trap a few spams, then I forward my mail automatically from that server to my Yahoo account (that I pay for). The yahoo address doesn't do anything for my academic profile but it's a much better spam filter than the one they have on the server. So I have layered spam filters in this way. I have to say Yahoo has impressed me. I do have to train it a bit. It sometimes puts AoIR messages in the Bulk folder so I haven't trained it too well. Only two spammers I have to block their messages more than once - and that's in the last 4 years. For $25/year US it's well worth it. Cheers, Denise ===== Denise N. Rall, PhD candidate, School of Environ. Science, Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480 - Mobile 0438 233 344 Sustainable Forestry Mentoring Coordinator & Casual academic Coastal Resource Management - Ph-Off (02)6620 3789 Hours: M 1-4:30 Presenting! Assoc. of Internet Researchers 5.0, Sussex University http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/rsm/staff/pages/drall/index.html
A belated "seconded!" in re SpamBayes. I've used it for quite some time, with consistent and powerful results: I hardly ever see spam in my inbox, and it so rarely misclassifies nonspam as spam that I've stopped checking the "Junk mail" folder for possible mistakes. The only problem I've had with SpamBayes was when I started using Taskline as well. Both are Outlook plugins, and normally work fine. But my Outlook tasklist has over 400 items, so that Taskline soon fills the forms cache. Tools> Options> Other> Advanced> CustomForms> ManageForms> Clear Cache, once a week or so, fixes that. Which is important, because I probably couldn't do without either of these plugins. -eg
-----Original Message----- From: air-l-aoir.org-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-aoir.org-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Frank Schaap Sent: Tuesday, August 17, 2004 5:03 AM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-l] screening out spam
Gary Thompson wrote:
The recent spate of messages from those trying to unsubscribe reminds me that about 2/3 of everything I get via e-mail-even with an academic address-is spam. I've got my "rules" set up so as to try to catch some of this:
Since you talk about "rules" I suppose you're using Microsoft Outlook (Express).
--if the subject line contains certain keywords, e.g., "market," "drugs," "investment," "penis," "casino," then it goes into my trash box. --if the from line contains "admin," then it goes in the trash box --if the "to" says "undisclosed recipients," etc.
I'm wondering whether others have had success with similar rules, as opposed to installing spam-killing software (and as for that, how well does it work, when spammers garble key words so as to avoid screening, e.g., Vi*ag*kra or other combinations).
It helps a little... but unless your e-mail client lets you write sophisticated regular expressions into the rules (which Outlook doesn't afaik), you quickly end up with countless not terribly effective rules. I tried this too before our department admins installed server side spam filtering on the Exchange server.
One of the reasons that 'professional' spam fighters have moved beyond 'mere' rule based filtering is that because spamfilters have to be made available to the public, dedicated spammers will quickly find ways around static rules for filtering spam.
A Bayesian spamfilter is a more dynamic type of filter that goes through a learning period in which you tell it which messages are spam and which messages are ham. It classifies a number of characteristics of these messages and depending on their statistical occurrence in either category incoming messages are sorted into either the spam or the ham category.
Mozilla based e-mail clients such as the Mozilla Suite and Thunderbird <http://mozilla.org> contain bayesian filters. Personally I'm very pleased with the end result. I haven't seen a spam message up close for a long while and I haven't had any false positives after a rather short training period. The Mozilla based clients support both POP and IMAP.
But, if you just have to use Outlook to access your department's Exchange server and your department admins refuse to install spamfiltering on the server, you can run a bayesian filter in your own Outlook install (if they've given you enough permissions to install it). Have a look at Spambayes <http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/>
Eventually I guess we'll see some sort of authentication system that makes e-mail traceable. For the moment I just try to keep my personal, non-list related e-mail addresses off the web and out of newsgroups. For that kind of use I set up free throw-away accounts that I use for a couple of months untill they become useless.
HTH
Frank.
-- My Personal Portal (TM) http://fragment.nl/
_______________________________________________ Air-l-aoir.org mailing list Air-l-aoir.org@listserv.aoir.org http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
I personally use an exclusive filter. If you are not on my list I never hear from you. This works for me. I also have diff email addresses for diff purposes. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gary Thompson" <glt@svsu.edu> To: <air-l@aoir.org> Sent: Tuesday, August 17, 2004 11:48 AM Subject: [Air-l] screening out spam The recent spate of messages from those trying to unsubscribe reminds me that about 2/3 of everything I get via e-mail—even with an academic address—is spam. I’ve got my “rules” set up so as to try to catch some of this: --if the subject line contains certain keywords, e.g., “market,” “drugs,” “investment,” “penis,” “casino,” then it goes into my trash box. --if the from line contains “admin,” then it goes in the trash box --if the “to” says “undisclosed recipients,” etc. I’m wondering whether others have had success with similar rules, as opposed to installing spam-killing software (and as for that, how well does it work, when spammers garble key words so as to avoid screening, e.g., Vi*ag*kra or other combinations). Gary Thompson _______________________________________________ Air-l-aoir.org mailing list Air-l-aoir.org@listserv.aoir.org http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
participants (7)
-
Denise N. Rall -
Derek McMillan -
Ellis Godard -
Frank Schaap -
Gary Thompson -
James Howison -
Tom Diffenbach