Inbox Spam Update

Monday, March 20. 2006

In my last entry on spam, I mentioned I would move to using POPFile as my mail junk filter. I turned off the ineffective Bayes filtering of SpamAssassin and just left it to toss blatant spam using its other rules. I also disabled Thunderbird's junk filter.

POPFile has done well. So far it has classified nearly 14,000 messages, 85% of which were spam. So that means my local system had to download nearly 12,000 spams before the POPFile classifier could junk them. It would be great to have a system like this on the server to prevent that wasted message downloading.

POPFile has been a bit too aggressive in classifying messages as spam. I still have to browse the junk folder now and then to make sure a legitimate message isn't there. On the other hand, very spams actually show up in the inbox.

I'm still contemplating going to using a whitelist and blocking everything else, but I'll save that battle for another day.

Posted by Mike Boone in Tech at 14:56 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

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I was just wondering how POPFile is doing for you now that you have been using it a while. I use it and rarely have legit mail misclassified as spam. According to the stats POPFile reports back, users with over 500 messages have an average accuracy of 98.2%. And the overall stats are >96.5% since the stats program has been running again. You can view the stats here:

http://popfile.sourceforge.net/popfile_stats.html

#1 JoeChongq (Homepage) on 2006-05-05 17:28 (Reply)

I just checked my stats. As of today, POPFile has classified more than 26,000 messages, and only 202 we errors, giving a percentage of greater than 99%. My main concern is false-positive spam, and I've had 113 of those. I check my junk folder regularly to make sure POPFile didn't mark something spam that it shouldn't have. Overall I'm pretty happy with it. I wish I could run it server-side so I didn't have to download nearly 23,000 spams.

#2 Mike Boone (Homepage) on 2006-05-05 18:53 (Reply)

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