[gentoo-dev] Spam filters

["Henrik Treadup" <hetr9922@student.su.se>]

Spam is (I assume) a problem not only for the gentoo-dev mailing list but 
also for all other gentoo lists. Closing gentoo-dev doesn't solve the 
problem. The other lists will still get spam.
Should the other lists also be closed? (Closing gentoo-newbies is probably a 
bad idea.) The solution IMHO is a filter on the gentoo mailserver. 

A lot of people mention Spamassassin. There is a world of difference between 
Spamassassin and a Bayesian filter like Bogofilter. 

Spamassassin is written in Perl. Bogofilter is written in C.
Spamassassin uses header analysis, text analysis, blacklists, Razor (a spam 
tracking database)
Bogofilter uses word count. Which one do you think is faster? 

I've learnt about two great ideas this year. Gentoo (the idea of a ports 
sytem) and Bayesian Spam filters. 

If you wan't to feel a happy warm glowing feeling for the rest of the day go 
and read http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html
 From Grahams article 

"To the recipient, spam is easily recognizable. If you hired someone to read 
your mail and discard the spam, they would have little trouble doing it. How 
much do we have to do, short of AI, to automate this process? 

I think we will be able to solve the problem with fairly simple algorithms. 
In fact, I've found that you can filter present-day spam acceptably well 
using nothing more than a Bayesian combination of the spam probabilities of 
individual words. Using a slightly tweaked (as described below) Bayesian 
filter, we now miss less than 5 per 1000 spams, with 0 false positives." 

/Henrik Treadup
hetr9922@student.su.se 

PS. I have yet to see a spam email on this list that would have gotten 
through a bayesian filter.