SpamBayes Outlook Addin: Here’s a spam filter for Outlook that runs on Bayesian theory. You give it a folder of good emails (your inbox) and a folder of spam that you’ve collected, then let it analyze both.
From then on, it will use this information to assign a score to each incoming message and either leave it in the Inbox, banish it to a spam folder, or put it in an “unsure” folder where you can review it. You can set the thresholds: for me, a message is for sure good if the “spam score” is less than 15, it’s for sure spam if the score is above 90, and the rest is unsure.
You can manually tag messages as spam, or rescue them as legitimate, and the filter incorporates that action into future classification — essentially you train the filter as to what you consider spam and what you don’t. The longer you use it, the more bulletproof it supposedly becomes and the tighter you can make the thresholds.
It installs beautifully, and seems to work pretty well right out of the box. I let it analzye about 100 good emails and 300 spams (I had to shut SpamKiller off for a few hours to collect them), and it had very few mistakes. I’m training mine now, and I’ll update when I decide if it works or not.
Here's something that may be a new trend in spam: including semi-newsworthy information in an attempt to add some value to the spam. I got an email the other day entitled "Medal Count." It appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be an accurate medal count for each country from…
Looks like spammers are trying to fool Bayesian filters by diluting their text. I got a spam today with two lines at the top advertising "cash freedom" or something, and I noticed that the message scrolled quite a bit. After about a hundred line breaks, I found this: I…
A Plan for Spam: In the last few months, we've talked about Bayesian-this and Bayesian-that quite a bit, but what does "Bayesian" mean? Here's a great article that explains the concepts behind Bayesian filtering for spam. It's long, but a worthwhile read. The Achilles heel of the spammers is…
Working with Bayesian Categorizers: Jon Udell tests a novel theory: if SpamBayes can effectively determine what I think is spam and what I don't, then why couldn't it be used to determine blog posts I want to read and those I don't if, given a big enough sample of both? There's…
Gates gets serious about spam, security: This is new. Sounds Bayesian. Google News had no mention of it prior to seven hours ago. Gates also said both technology and legal efforts may help curb spam, the unsolicited e-mails that clog inboxes and create headaches for Information Technology departments. He said…
Bayesian filter for MT: This looks promising. Hope it works as good as Bayesian spam filter for Outlook. "...I spent the last 2 days working on a bayesian plugin. To cut the story short, the plugin will allow you to train your movabletype blog to automatically identify spam comments and…
I've begun using Mozilla Mail for personal email, and I've been quite impressed with its "junk mail filters." It appears to be a rule-based filtering system which seems awfully accurate at flagging messages as spam. Over the weekend, I got 182 emails, and Mozilla slashed this total to five by…
We're just getting hammered by Sobig this morning. It got into a mailing list used by one of the organizations we belong to and we're getting them at the rate of one every five seconds or so. My Bayesian Outlook Filter is dumping most of them, but one guy here…
For the record, I've been using this for two weeks or so now, and it works beautifully. False positives have been limited to "spammish" newsletters, and they go to the Unsure folder.
Very, very rare that I get a legitimate email into the Spam folder. Great product. I installed it on my boss's machine, if that shows you how much I trust him.
Six weeks now, and the system is near-perfect. I tweaked my settings a bit, and the Unsure folder is usually all spam as well.
One problem with the system: as near as I can tell, it is not possible to "whitelist" email that you know is ALWAYS good, no matter how spammish it appears. Conseqeuntly, I do have some newsletters hitting the spam folder.
I'm thinking that perhaps I set up Outlook rules for these to copy them to a Newsletters folder so that they always end up somewhere I can read them, rather than having to rescue them from spam.
Still, however, this is the best spam solution I have used.
I just got an email back from Mark Hammond, the creator. He says that you can't whitelist, and that they have no plans to include this.
i used it great for a few weeks then it stop working and i can't get it to work again, uninstalling 006 and installing 007 didn't help
I was impressed how SpamBayes works with Outlook. Good job.
