Recent SPAM - agh!!!!!

Not too surprisingly there has been an increase in spam - the season and all?

I regularly send these as attachments to [email protected] as previously advised to do but I am still seeing the same "type" by subject coming up.

Just how does the spam filter get trained if not by the likes of me sending these offending emails & if the filter does not seem to be 'learning' should I be bothering to send them in to the above address? It is easier for me to delete them than corral them to one folder for forwarding!!!

:~(

I share your frustration with this. I have been devoutly sending this stuff to the spam filter for "training", for months now, yet still it doesn't seem to filter even the most blatant and oft-repeated examples.

I agree, too, that it's easier just to delete than bother reporting them as "spam". I wonder why items tagged as spam couldn't be moved to the trash automatically, instead of having to do it as a separate operation. You're hardly likely to want to keep things you've just identified as spam.

T.

Glad I am not the only one ;~)

When I typed my OP I realised it has been a very long while since I had any IDed as SPAM - I am fairly sure I had not changed my filtering settings in the meantime? Certainly used to see some marked as SPAM. On another host I use they have Spam Assassin running and it is good, I trust it not to ID genuine ones so all I need to is delete them all wholesale once received.

I look forward to James or one of the other +Net regulars dropping in to give a definitive answer?

I have also wondered lately whether the spam filter had mysteriously reset itself to "OFF" - but haven't bothered to check (not least because I can't remember how or where it's set).

I have a feeling it did happen once before, though.

T.

I should say first that we all share the frustration.

The answer to your second question is that we are using a third party plugin for squirrelmail to power the report spam button, and it doesn't move the mail to the trash. Colin has been working on improving the functionality although I'm not sure how far he got. I will check when he's back at work in the new year. We will need to rethink the process at any rate once Postini is implemented fully so I'm not sure which will come first.

That is the point really. We have invested heavily in new technology to combat the spam issue, which is impacting all of us and until that comes into play I don't think we can do much to counter the problem. The need for the new solution has come about because of the inadequacies in the current Dspam implementation. Although we are still training Dspam, the reality is that it isn't very effective. Among other things, by the time the learning takes effect the spam attack has changed and it's too late. There has been deep discussion on the technicalities of this in our forums so I won't repeat it here.

Suffice it to say that Postini should make an immense difference to the amount of spam people are getting. The trial is available now and has seen good results for most people, although I wouldn't recommend anyone with a critical dependence on email.

Ian

Hmmmm! just had a look on the portal having logged in and the 'look' has changed, goes to show how few times I bother to access the portal lol!

Mine is "on" (I am sure there used to be different levels) and the reason I do not get "spam" id'ed emails is that I elected to dump them in the webmail spam folder but there is nothing in there. However because of the lack of my webmail activity it/they have been archived but if spam is as frequent as the non IDed ones why isn't there any in the webmail spam folder for my 'domain' as +Net like to call it i.e. all my mailboxes spam defaults to the one spam box. Potentially confused or what?

PS For the record I have my email client (OE) settings to leave mail on the server for I think without checking 45days, this I have always done as a precaution against system crashes but if the webmail is archiving everything routinely I wonder what the procedure is to retrieve them & as I have the settings also to delete locally deleted ones from the server how do the so selected ones get removed from the archive??????

Well, it's definitely not defaulted to "off", as it has identified two or three things this morning, but there is still obviously spammy stuff getting through. I've just deleted one with the f-word right in the title. It hardly looks like legitimate personal or business correspondence. I know spam filtering is not quite as simple as it may seem, because the mere presence of obscenity doesn't always mean it's spam. However, I would think the inclusion of certain specific words in the title would usually be a pretty good indication. If they use some kind of point-scoring system to determine what probably is or isn't spam, there are definitely things still getting through that I'd expect to have scored a lot of "spampoints".

T.

Hi Ian & happy new year to you & all at +Net

We were typing at the same time - please see my last post.

I note in your post you say "DSpam" not DeSpam I have been sending to spam@despam is that still correct (I am sure the original email yonks ago gave the despam addy) or should it have been spam@dspam all along???

The despam address is valid... for some reason I don't think we could use dspam for the purpose (Can't for the life of me remember why).

Seasons greetings back at ya too :-)

Ian

So much has been posted about this in the last few months that I don't think another full explanation of how the spam scoring works will help much. As I say, we know it's far from good enough and we are working as hard as possible to replace the system with one that does work properly!

If you want us to investigate an issue you think is specific to your account, please raise a ticket. If you want to let me have the number once you have done that I can take more of a look.

Cheers,

Ian