[Ti] [OT] Mail.app spam definitions

[Tarik Bilgin]

On Thursday, August 28, 2003, at 07:53  am, Joel Hopwood wrote:

> OK, so I'm *still* receiving 40-50 sobig virus emails A DAY.... thanks 
> to the Windows world. I don't mind receiving the infected mail, since 
> it can't hurt me and goes straight into the Junk folder, but when is 
> Mail going to twig that these are all junk?

joel -- did you start getting these a while ago or just in the last 
couple of days?

I didn't EVER get spam (maybe one or two a fortnight) and now I am 
getting spammed (through my  mailserver I fear)   to the tune of 40-50 
sobig attachments per day (I've already contacted the server sysadmin ).

If so,  my theory (as we both have accounts on the same machine, Joel) 
may be correct.

>
> Does anybody know when Mail updates its filters?

Mail claims to "learn" what is junk. It seems to me after trying to 
work out what it does that beyond some simple rules (no reply to 
address, mail sent to a large distribution list etc), it does nothing 
more to "refine" it's filter except that when you click "this is junk" 
on an email it may consider emails with the same Subject line or from 
the same sender as junk (I could be wrong about this).

A while ago I asked our mail sysadmin to switch on Spam Assassin mail 
filtering on my POP mailbox. What happens is now all these mails get 
*****SPAM***** prepended to the Subject and so I can set up my own rule 
to trash these.

I have been watching the success of Spam Assassin over the last 6 
months and so far it has missed less than 10 emails that were spam, and 
caught only one email that wasn't true spam (although it was a "chain 
letter" type useless forward from someone I know).

My recommendation is switch off the Junk filter in Mail.app and go for 
filtering at the server level (contact our sysadmin).

--
Tarik Bilgin
Opalblue
tarik at opalblue.com