Dspam

[Samuel Luxford-Watts]

Oh well... Guess if it looks too good to be true.... It usually is!

-----Original Message-----
From: Julian Field [mailto:mailscanner at ECS.SOTON.AC.UK]
Sent: 24 February 2004 12:24
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: Dspam


At 11:36 24/02/2004, you wrote:
>Has anyone had look at DSpam?
>See http://www.nuclearelephant.com/projects/dspam
>
>The author seems to write off SpamAssassin as a filter totally (see
>http://www.nuclearelephant.com/projects/dspam/faq.html#1.7 ) and perl
>implementations in general
>
>any thoughts on that?
>
>Regards, Tony

It's very much an aggressive sales pitch. His example of his largest site at
125,000 mailboxes is not very big at all. I have sites with over 100 times
that amount. As for his "peaks at 99.984% accuracy", that's just like an
advertisement telling you that you can get "up to 30% off in the sale". If
he chose his sample right, he should be able to say that it peaks at 100%
accuracy.

Sounds like a bunch of Bayes-based or similar approaches. If he is relying
on 1 tool like this, he is doomed to failure as the spammers work round his
filters. The more popular he gets, the faster his approach will die.
SpamAssassin succeeds through its use of so many different approaches
blended into 1 system. It is easy to fool one or two of them at once, but
very hard to fool all of them at the same time.

SpamAssassin Myth 2: you just set up a spam and notspam address just as
described countless times on this mailing list. SpamAssassin Myth 3: only
true if you use the "spamassassin" script, which almost no-one does.
MailScanner certainly doesn't suffer this problem.

Oh, and while we're at it, Perl is not an interpreted language, it's a
just-in-time compiled language. It just looks like an interpreted language.

This just reads like a bolshy sales talk. "I'm wonderful and everyone else
is c**p, and I'm going to keep telling you!". I fully expect there are some
good components in there, and I expect the SpamAssassin guys have looked at
it and made their own judgement on whether there are useful ideas.

Slagging off all the opposition isn't actually a very good way of convincing
people of your argument. Some of what he says is true, but certainly not all
of it. And since I can quickly see several mistakes in his information, how
much else is made up?
--
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
MailScanner thanks transtec Computers for their support

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