[DaGuy]

Viagra is supposed to solved certain problems... In my case it just creates them in form of mountains of associated junk mail.

I was wondering if we could share some Mail filter tips and tricks aimed deleting those annoying emails?

[Arkham_c]

Spambayes. It is amazing.

I keep meaning to release my GUI version. In the interim, you can get the CLI version here:

http://spambayes.sf.net/

[Paso]

Since I use mail.app and trained the junkmail filter for about 4 weeks, nearly all of my SPAM gets junked automatically. No Problem with SPAM whatsoever (and I get neary 250-300 Spammails per week).

[dole]

Originally posted by Arkham_c:
Spambayes. It is amazing.

I keep meaning to release my GUI version. In the interim, you can get the CLI version here:

http://spambayes.sf.net/

That link isn't working for me. It would be nice having this since I keep getting about 20 or so of these viagra emails a day.

[DaGuy]

I wonder if it would be possible to see what the Mail app filter has learned? If this were possible, then could begin thinking about sharing filters.

[DaGuy]

How much junk mail goes undetected by your filters?

I average about a dozen per day. Maybe that's not so bad, after all, since I know I was getting hammered when I didn't have the filtering capability. Perhaps furhter reducing that number is utopic. What do you think?

[Macola]

The best way, IMO, to deal with spam is to stop it at the server. Mail client filtering is pretty useless since it's already sucking up your bandwidth/disk space by then. I really like SpamCop for this--besides filtering, you can report spam and thereby contribute to better blocklists. Every once in a while, you can actually get a spammer shut down. Until the death penalty gets extended to spammers, that's the next best solution

[Paso]

Originally posted by DaGuy:
How much junk mail goes undetected by your filters?

I estimate about 5 spammails a week go undetected here and about 2 are maybe falsly classified as spam.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by dole:
That link isn't working for me. It would be nice having this since I keep getting about 20 or so of these viagra emails a day.

That's really funny considering what your name is.

Seriously, you could just set up a filter to delete any mail that contained the word "Viagra".

[ZackS]

I just keep training Mail as I go. I get about 1 unsolicited in my inbox per day and no false positives. Just keep training and it'll eventually catch everything.

[iDriveX]

Originally posted by ZackS:
I just keep training Mail as I go. I get about 1 unsolicited in my inbox per day and no false positives. Just keep training and it'll eventually catch everything.

I have to reiterate what Zack says. I get about 1 piece of spam in about 3 days and I also train mail as I go. Seems to be getting better and better. I have gotten one false positive in about a year. I review what Mail has filtered every so often...In fact, here's a little stat for you:

Today I have received 12 pieces of junk mail, 11 of them were addressed to me perfectly.

Since July 10th, I have received 733 pieces of junk mail. About 1% of that I actually had to mark as junk mail and send it to the junk mail box.

I think Mail has saved me A LOT of time by taking care of about 720 pieces of junk mail for me, you really can't beat it (well maybe you can, but you can't beat the setup and ease of use and the fact it's built into the OS)

[mattyd]

Originally posted by Macola:
The best way, IMO, to deal with spam is to stop it at the server.

i agree. use use earthlink's spaminator, catches most of my junk mail, mail.app gets most of the rest. not so much ends up in my inbox anymore.

check with your ISP to see if they offer something similar.

[DaGuy]

Originally posted by CharlesS:
That's really funny considering what your name is.

Seriously, you could just set up a filter to delete any mail that contained the word "Viagra".

That is very funny.



I got the filter but the stupid things keep getting through.

[tooki]

I spend $40/year for email through netaddress.com. And you know what? The Brightmail spam filtering they have is worth every penny. I have it set to delete spam at the server. I get literally maybe 3 spams per week now -- and those get promptly forwarded to their spam submission address, where they get forwarded to Brightmail to be added to their database. (Without the filtering, about 20 spams were coming in per day.)

Something to consider.

tooki

[DaGuy]

I wonder what Apple uses in .mac?

[iDriveX]

Originally posted by tooki:
I spend $40/year for email through netaddress.com. And you know what? The Brightmail spam filtering they have is worth every penny. I have it set to delete spam at the server. I get literally maybe 3 spams per week now -- and those get promptly forwarded to their spam submission address, where they get forwarded to Brightmail to be added to their database. (Without the filtering, about 20 spams were coming in per day.)

Something to consider.

tooki

My only quam with that is what if Brightmail wrongly considers something as Spam...Is there a way to retrieve messages?

What I'm trying to say is, if I send you a message and Brightmail for some reason thinks my e-mail address is a spam address, will it block all messages from me? And if so, is there any recourse for you to get your messages from me?

[mmurray]

Originally posted by DaGuy:
I wonder what Apple uses in .mac?

I thought it was Bayesian filtering. I think it goes like this:

You feed the filter a large bucket of spam and a large bucket of not-spam. It makes a list of every word in all the emails and how many times they occur in spam and not-spam.

Now when you get a new email it checks all the words against the list and picks the 15 (10 ?) that occur most often in the spam list and ditto the not-spam list. Then you form a weighted sum to score how likely it is to be spam. Then if the score is greater than some
number you have checked its spam.

There is lots of info if you search on Google.
I think this

http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html

is one of the first articles.

When you manually assign to spam or not spam it adjusts the filters.

I am using Eudora 6 beta and it does a very nice job of Bayesian filtering. It can also have options like automatically declaring any email from someone on a whitelist not spam.

As far as I am concerned this has `solved' spam for me.


Michael

[Arkham_c]

SpamBayes is here:

http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/


Sorry that other link didn't work -- I was in a hurry and was working from memory.

If it's out of your league to install, PM me and I'll put a Mac GUI version on my server for you to grab. I have finished it, I just need to write up some documentation on how to use it before I distribute it. I have half a dozen friends who are using it and love it.

[tooki]

Originally posted by iDriveX:
My only quam with that is what if Brightmail wrongly considers something as Spam...Is there a way to retrieve messages?

What I'm trying to say is, if I send you a message and Brightmail for some reason thinks my e-mail address is a spam address, will it block all messages from me? And if so, is there any recourse for you to get your messages from me?

A legitimate concern indeed.

Here's how Brightmail (as implemented by my email service) works:

default setting:
1. Brightmail looks for spam, and when it finds one, it prefixes the Subject line with "[SPAM] ". Other than that, it continues through to your inbox.

the other options are:
2. #1, plus move to junk folder on email server -- but you must log in through webmail frequently to delete the spam, lest you fill up your mailbox.

3. Delete spam right on the server.



For about a year, I used option 1 (where I still got all the spam, but it was pre-tagged for me), and at the end of the year, I was totally convinced that it wasn't giving me any false positives. (When they very first installed brightmail, it ONCE caught a mass-mailing from MacMall, but that was it. It never had a false positive after that. It has never at any point tagged as spam an email from an individual.) At that point, I decided to set it to #3, where it's deleted on the server. I haven't looked back, as it reduces the amount of messages I get by about 2/3.

tooki

[simonmartin]

Originally posted by DaGuy:
Viagra is supposed to solved certain problems... In my case it just creates them in form of mountains of associated junk mail.

I was wondering if we could share some Mail filter tips and tricks aimed deleting those annoying emails?

No mail filter trick but yesterday I installed POPfile. <http://popfile.sourceforge.net/> it's Open Source, free and it *really seems to work*.


I used this site <http://www.artz-net.de/popfile/> to install the thing.

The author's link to the MIME-Base64 module is broken. I used <http://search.cpan.org/author/GAAS/MIME-Base64-2.20/>

Don't bother with the method he suggests to start the server. Use <http://www.oakandapple.org/software/PFStartup.html>. The instructions on the POPFile installation page mentions this in fact...

The installation only takes a short while. I then created two 'Buckets', one named 'junk', the other 'mail'.

I then turned on 'Subject modification' on the 'junk' bucket only so that any junk mail gets [junk] added to the subject line. I then set up a rule in Mail to file these messages in the junk folder. This rule needs to sit at the top of the stack.

I also set up the 'Magnets' in POPFile. These act as rules in Mail do. I imagine this greatly increases the accuracy/learning of the system.

Have a quick look at the FAQ as well <http://sourceforge.net/docman/displa...group_id=63137>

Try it out. It's great!

Simon