[X4U] Stopping Spam - Does Anything Work?

[Jim Warthman]

Dave,
I use SpamSieve too, and I've had very good luck with it.

Have you tried retraining SpamSieve on both your "good" and your "spam"
messages? That helps quite a lot. For that reason alone, I keep a "Spam"
folder, rather than just deleting the Spam.

Also, I don't have SpamSieve automatically move my spam anywhere. Instead, I
have it mark the spam with a category (I'm using MS Entourage 2004). I can
show just the spam category, sort by sender's name or subject, and very
quickly scan the list to see if there is anything that *shouldn't* have been
marked spam. If I find one, which I rarely do, then I select it and use the
menu item for "Add Good" to train SpamSieve on that particular e-mail.

One last question:  how are your SpamSieve preferences set? I have all the
"Filter" checkboxes enabled, except for "Encoded HTML mail is spam". Under
"Training", I have all the boxes checked except for "Allow good duplicates
in corpus". Finally, under "Advanced" I have the "strategy" slider set right
in the middle. These settings have worked very, very well for me.  When I
show statistics, SpamSieve has 1,909 "Blocklist Rules", 677 "Whitelist
Rules", 1,625 "Good Messages" and 3,390 Spam Messages in its corpus. It says
it's had a 99.5% correct rate since August 1st.

How do my settings compare to your settings?

Enjoy!

-- Jim


On 2005-01-15 7:23 AM, "revDAVE" <coolcat at hostalive.com> wrote:

> I have a favorite older e-mail address, that gets around 100 or more Spam
> E-Mail's per day. Even though my Spam filter does a great job ( Spam Sieve),
> I am getting very sick of checking the spam Mail for false positives prior
> to deletion.  
> 
> So, before I retire my favorite old email address,  I was wondering if
> there's any way to get spammers to stop -  Org least cut down on spamming
> you? 
> 
> For example:  I know that a major No - No is to respond to the sender -
> however what about sending them a bounce back message? Would that help at
> all?  
> 
> At one point I deleted  a highly spammed e-mail address ( at the ISP server)
> for three months -  in the hopes that spammers would see this as a dead
> address -  but when I recreated that address ( at the ISP host ) -  the Spam
> started right back up again...
> 
> - are there any other tricks I can try first?
> 
> - Losing Good New E-mail's
> 
> Also:  Given the above situation - with tons of Spam associated with an
> address ... A new problem has arisen for me: ...  Basically, as I checked
> for false positives in the Spam folder ...  There is a greater and greater
> chance - that a legitimate E-mail sent from a good person who is new -  and
> not in my e-mail address book - will get missed -  and I will accidentally
> toss it. Is there any way to protect against this type of loss? For example
> - if a friend of mine tells me that a friend of his might send me E-mail - I
> will either try to get it and add that person's e-mail address in advance -
> or will tell my friend to tell the person to write something crazy in the
> subject line that I will not miss...
> 
>  Any Other Good Tricks?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> --
> Thanks - RevDave
> CoolCat at hostalive.com
> [db-lists]
> 
> 
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