I don't mean to take anything away from your project, but why try to
reinvent the wheel? There are *plenty* of filters that work
wonderfully and require little effort on your part to make them work.
I use SpamAssassin and it works 99.999% of the time. Its perfectly
compatible with Procmail and is very easy to install and maintain.
Well, Mike, there are lots of reasons. But, first, I didn't reinvent
the wheel. I have been developing my procmail anti-spam recipes for
four years. How old is SA?
Second, I do use SA, as a fall-through after my recipes are done. I
last had SA catch spam for me (that my own recipes didn't catch) about
two weeks ago. I use SA as a sanity check, to make sure that my
recipes are in top shape.
Third, my recipes are better than SA. Without significant tuning,
SA gives me lots of false pozzes, and a few false negs. My recipes
are simply more accurate.
Fourth, and I've saved the best for last: SA is a HOG. I refuse to
fire up perl for each message, and I refuse to full-body-grep each
message that comes in. That is the same philosophy that spawns all
bloatware. In my quest to do better than SA on my own, I use
*essentially no* body greps. I find that I can consistently
catch 99.7% of spam, with very few false pozzes, using only
header matches. I don't even look for $$$$$$$ or !!!!!!! or
"FREE!!!" in the Subject:. Not that it's not a useful check; but
I just don't need it. The spam gives itself away by characteristics,
so I rarely need to rely on specific choices of spammy words.
My recipes are lean and mean. I can check and recheck batches
of spam at little cost. One hundred at a time running through
my full rc, with log writes to /dev/tty, happen in 20 seconds.
I think I must be at about 100 times more efficient than SA.
SA is useful. I use it as a tool to help me tune my recipes. But
I don't want to rely on it. I'd rather be in full personal control
of what happens to my mail.
--
Dallman Ross
"If you find a path with no obstacles, it probably does not lead to
anywhere."
Thoughts of Rev. Sunnan Kubose, from _Zen in the Markets_
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