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My hunch is that Google's spam detection is not necessarily better than open-source solutions. It's just that they may have a larger corpus of data to train the
by hrjet 13y ago
My hunch is that Google's spam detection is not necessarily better than open-source solutions. It's just that they may have a larger corpus of data to train the system on.
If I host my own email server, my spam filter will only have my inputs to determine what is spam.
This leads me to an idea. There probably can be a service to build a dynamic corpus of spam samples. If I mark a message as spam, my email server can send a sample to the service, and periodically, my email server will download "top 100" samples to feed its filter.
- kilburn 13y agoThis isn't necessarily a good idea. The type of SPAM you receive is different than the type of SPAM I receive. Moreover, it is very possible that I do (not) consider some messages as SPAM whereas you do (not). It is true that it takes some time to train the filter, but after that initial period you will get better results if you only train it with your own SPAM. I've been hosting my own email on a small personal server for some ~7 years now. All my email addresses redirect here (I have 9 frequently used addresses, and a bunch of website-specific ones). I'm using spamassassin (plus amavisd-new) as a proxy content filter. These are my filter's numbers for the last three days: 2 BAD-HEADER-2 1 BAD-HEADER-8 47 BANNED 297 CLEAN 6 INFECTED 426 SPAM 14 SPAMMY Spammy mails are delivered to a special "Spam" folder (just like in GMail). All those were indeed SPAM messages. I've received no spam messages outside of those. The high number of CLEAN mails is because I'm subscribed to a few mailing lists and I receive notifications/tracking info/alerts from a number of services. TL;DR: SpamAssassin is hard to setup and train correctly (just like the rest of a server's mail-stack). However, once you get over this part, the results can be as good as gmail's.
- justinmk 13y ago> I've received no spam messages outside of those. How protective are you of your email address? My email is posted all over the internet, but I haven't seen spam in gmail for at least 6 months--probably longer.
- kilburn 13y agoI have a special "don't care" mail account whose mails are delivered to its own folder (included in the shown stats). I do get a spam message in that folder very occasionally (as in once per month), but it's really far off from becoming annoying.
- enjo 13y agoI have a huge spam problem with gmail. Someone sold my email + first name. Googles spam filters are simply powerless if you include a first name in the email. I've reported these as spam (several a day) for months at this point. Hell, it gets marked as important.
- magicalist 13y ago> Googles spam filters are simply powerless if you include a first name in the email I think you're going to have to look elsewhere for a cause. Someone (probably several someones) sold out my email and first and full name. Gmail has no problem correctly categorizing all sorts of spam addressed to me by name.
- baudehlo 13y agoWhatever the cause is, it's still Google's fault/problem. I too have a big gmail spam problem (related to my email address being very short and guessable), and mark as spam on average about 10-20 emails a day.
- ChristianBundy 13y ago> Whatever the cause is, it's still Google's fault/problem. Why is it that no matter what the cause is, you feel that Google is to blame?
- dbpatterson 13y agoErr... because Google's spam filter is letting the message in? Seriously, it is a spam message, delivered to Google, and Google put it in the inbox instead of the spam filter. I don't know how much more clear cut it could be.
- oijaf888 13y agoIsn't that pretty much what Vipul's Razor does? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipul%27s_Razor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipul%27s_Razor
- hrjet 13y agoWasn't aware of that; thanks!