[H-GEN] People's thoughts on Greylisting

[Michael Anthon]

On 11/26/05, Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> wrote:
> dropped to 93.5%.  But I'm happy enough with that and I have yet
> to try Dspam, which is on my todo list for early next year.  For

I thoroughly recommend DSpam.  I have no need for it now as I handle
all my mail with Gmail (which does an even better job of spam
filtering...) but I did run it for maybe 12 months prior to that.  My
stats are a bit skewed now because I haven't touched it for a while
but I was getting about 2-3 missed spams a day and hadn't had a missed
innocent for several weeks[1].  I was getting maybe 100-150 emails a
day with about 70% of that being spam.

The trick is to give it a really good example of /your/ corpus of both
spam and innocent email and then the accuracy you get is quite
astounding.

I also found the use of their CGI quarantine system to be very
effective as it has the ability to highlight emails that contain
certain keywords.  Handy for finding message sent to you by certain
people that tend to be detected as spam for whatever reason [2].  But
the other methods of retraining misclassified messages[3] are equally
effective.

Cheers,
Michael

[1] Most of the missed innocents that I did get were pretty much spam
anyway, such as "New Letters" from my carrier
[2] My Father sends me a few things every now and then (mostly chain
letter type tuff) that was being detected as spam
[3] Like either forwarding to specific adresses or moving to a maildir
folder that is then automatically reprocessed (I used this method as
it fitted my usage with Thunderbird or Mutt quite nicely)