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Posted to users@spamassassin.apache.org by Jerry Bell <jb...@stelesys.com> on 2004/12/20 16:41:33 UTC
Interesting NW article
There's a big review of anti-spam products at nw fusion here:
http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2004/122004spampkg.html?ts
Here's a bit on spamassassin:
http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2004/122004spamside6.html
It's a pretty disappointing article.
Jerry
http://www.syslog.org
Re: Interesting NW article
Posted by jdow <jd...@earthlink.net>.
Too bad Open Sores licensing cannot allow for a requirement on products
that embed the Open Source in a commercial product pour some support back
into the Open Source project. (I note smart companies like RedHat,
Mandrake, IBM, and perhaps now even McAfee do that anyway. This is a
good thing.)
{^_^}
----- Original Message -----
From: "James Lees Vodanovich" <ji...@comdotcom.com.au>
> The magazines real masters are its advertisers and its potential
Advertisers,
> who dont want to be compared to a free product, so any attempt at
contacting
> SA people would have been done in away to avoid a real response.
>
> Also the mag is aimed at the bigger end of the market where the money is,
> where people tend to buy names, which they can hide behind if things go
wrong
> and the blame game starts.
>
> Cynical yes but most likely true.
>
>
>
> On Wed, 22 Dec 2004 04:40 am, Thomas Arend wrote:
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> >
> > Am Montag, 20. Dezember 2004 16:41 schrieb Jerry Bell:
> > > There's a big review of anti-spam products at nw fusion here:
> > > http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2004/122004spampkg.html?ts
> > > Here's a bit on spamassassin:
> > > http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2004/122004spamside6.html
> > >
> > > It's a pretty disappointing article.
Re: Interesting NW article
Posted by James Lees Vodanovich <ji...@comdotcom.com.au>.
The magazines real masters are its advertisers and its potential Advertisers,
who dont want to be compared to a free product, so any attempt at contacting
SA people would have been done in away to avoid a real response.
Also the mag is aimed at the bigger end of the market where the money is,
where people tend to buy names, which they can hide behind if things go wrong
and the blame game starts.
Cynical yes but most likely true.
On Wed, 22 Dec 2004 04:40 am, Thomas Arend wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Am Montag, 20. Dezember 2004 16:41 schrieb Jerry Bell:
> > There's a big review of anti-spam products at nw fusion here:
> > http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2004/122004spampkg.html?ts
> > Here's a bit on spamassassin:
> > http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2004/122004spamside6.html
> >
> > It's a pretty disappointing article.
Re: Interesting NW article
Posted by Thomas Arend <ml...@arend-whv.info>.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Am Montag, 20. Dezember 2004 16:41 schrieb Jerry Bell:
> There's a big review of anti-spam products at nw fusion here:
> http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2004/122004spampkg.html?ts
> Here's a bit on spamassassin:
> http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2004/122004spamside6.html
>
> It's a pretty disappointing article.
>
> Jerry
> http://www.syslog.org
I agree that a lot in this article about spamassassin is bs. Nou but.
I'm using SA since a few days and had no problems. I bought a book from
O'Reiley about SA and had not trouble in upgrading from 2.6.4 to 3.01 and now
3.0.2.
Rule writing is not very difficult, so I'm writing my own rules and for mails
which still got through.
But I'm not near at 100%. Some mails are flagged as spam because of sorted
recipients but after lowering the score or whitelisting the sender in
procmailrc this is solved.
My opinion is that SA is easy to use and integrate.
Thomas
- --
icq:133073900
aim:tawhv
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Re: Interesting NW article
Posted by Marco van den Bovenkamp <ma...@linuxgoeroe.dhs.org>.
Kenneth Porter wrote:
> Also, SA is a component, not a complete solution. With 41 participants
> in the survey, it would be surprising not to find SA integrated into
> some of them. Perhaps some here can identify which products?
In the article
(http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2004/122004spamside2.html) they mention
the Roaring Penguin product (CanIt) and that of Paessler GmbH (No Spam
Today!) as based on SA.
--
Regards,
Marco.
Re: Interesting NW article
Posted by Kenneth Porter <sh...@sewingwitch.com>.
--On Monday, December 20, 2004 11:29 AM -0500 Jerry Bell
<jb...@stelesys.com> wrote:
> They do talk favorably of spamassassin in a few parts, but overall they
> seemed to have missed the boat.
>>From the article:
> The important core of SpamAssassin, a Bayesian engine, was recognizable
> in at least one-third of the products we tested and might well have been
> hidden in the guts of more. The strategy of combining multiple tests to
> identify spam is in nearly all modern, anti-spam products, including
> SpamAssassin.
Seems like they have it backwards. Bayes is a component, not the "core".
Also, SA is a component, not a complete solution. With 41 participants in
the survey, it would be surprising not to find SA integrated into some of
them. Perhaps some here can identify which products?
Here's the list of participants:
<http://www.nwfusion.com/bg/2003/spam/index.jsp>
Re: Interesting NW article
Posted by Jon Drukman <js...@cluttered.com>.
Jerry Bell wrote:
> Here's a snippet from the article:
> "The short answer is that no one submitted it, but of course there's more
> to it than that. This year we reached out to the SpamAssassin community
> and asked them to participate. Although a few well-meaning souls
> volunteered to be the contacts for SpamAssassin, when it came time to test
> no one would step up to the plate and represent the product at a level
> that would make it competitive to the other enterprise-focused vendors."
>
> They do talk favorably of spamassassin in a few parts, but overall they
> seemed to have missed the boat.
seems to me like their audience is the point n drool type of network
admin. if it doesn't have a setup.exe they classify it as hard to maintain.
yes, you have to read a manpage to set up spamassassin. yes there are
many different configs based on the various types of MTAs you can use,
and whether you want side-wide or per-user configs. you may have to
adjust scoring values to get a truly effective config. it took me maybe
an hour to get my head around how to set up a per-user config with
postfix and spamd. considering the amount of time it's saved me and my
friends dealing with spam, i'd say it was an excellent time investment.
Re: Interesting NW article
Posted by Jerry Bell <jb...@stelesys.com>.
Very strange. The link still works for me and everyone I've asked to try
it. Maybe they're doing some sort of server side blocking?
Here's a snippet from the article:
"The short answer is that no one submitted it, but of course there's more
to it than that. This year we reached out to the SpamAssassin community
and asked them to participate. Although a few well-meaning souls
volunteered to be the contacts for SpamAssassin, when it came time to test
no one would step up to the plate and represent the product at a level
that would make it competitive to the other enterprise-focused vendors."
They do talk favorably of spamassassin in a few parts, but overall they
seemed to have missed the boat.
Jerry
http://www.syslog.org
> On Mon, Dec 20, 2004 at 10:41:33AM -0500, Jerry Bell wrote:
>> Here's a bit on spamassassin:
>> http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2004/122004spamside6.html
>> It's a pretty disappointing article.
>
> Very much so:
>
> Forbidden
>
> You don't have permission to access /reviews/2004/122004spamside6.html on
> this
> server.
>
> Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an
> ErrorDocument to handle the request.
>
> --
> Randomly Generated Tagline:
> As King Arthur said: Some days it all seems so feudal.
>
Re: Interesting NW article
Posted by Theo Van Dinter <fe...@kluge.net>.
On Mon, Dec 20, 2004 at 11:27:23AM -0500, Jim Maul wrote:
> >Forbidden
> >You don't have permission to access /reviews/2004/122004spamside6.html on
> >this server.
>
> Works for me.
Hrm. Apparently they're just blocking all of my employer's IPs. I can
get to the page from my home machine, but both work's office and colo
IP ranges get 403s for all requests.
--
Randomly Generated Tagline:
"To win, you must treat a pressure situation as an opportunity to succeed,
not an opportunity to fail." - Gardner Dickinson
Re: Interesting NW article
Posted by Jim Maul <jm...@elih.org>.
Theo Van Dinter wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 20, 2004 at 10:41:33AM -0500, Jerry Bell wrote:
>
>>Here's a bit on spamassassin:
>>http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2004/122004spamside6.html
>>It's a pretty disappointing article.
>
>
> Very much so:
>
> Forbidden
>
> You don't have permission to access /reviews/2004/122004spamside6.html on this
> server.
>
> Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an
> ErrorDocument to handle the request.
>
Works for me.
-Jim
Re: Interesting NW article
Posted by Tim Donahue <td...@haynes-group.com>.
In case anyone else is having problems as well here is the SA-related
portion of the review.
Tim Donahue
Where's SpamAssassin?
By Joel Snyder
Network World, 12/20/04
"The short answer is that no one submitted it, but of course there's
more to it than that. This year we reached out to the SpamAssassin
community and asked them to participate. Although a few well-meaning
souls volunteered to be the contacts for SpamAssassin, when it came time
to test no one would step up to the plate and represent the product at a
level that would make it competitive to the other enterprise-focused
vendors.
Interest in SpamAssassin is understandable. In the small-business
market, the open source SpamAssassin dominates many anti-spam systems.
When well tuned and integrated by a value-added reseller (VAR) that
knows what it is doing, it turns out to be a very effective system.
SpamAssassin users routinely report 100% spam reduction and 0% false
positives (although these self-reported statistics are probably biased),
and are generally overjoyed with the results.
By itself, SpamAssassin is little more than the software implementation
of an interesting idea: apply statistics, neural networks and Bayesian
probabilities to the problem of classifying mail as spam or not. Train
the engine by giving it desirable and undesirable mail, and it can tell
you for each new message what pile it most resembles. It turns out to
work astonishingly well, especially in small businesses where mail flow
is very homogeneous. SpamAssassin's Bayesian engine even redefines the
meaning of spam by letting you say, "This is the mail I want," and "This
mail I don't want." SpamAssassin also mixes other tools into its scoring
system, such as DNS-based blacklists and collaborative scoring, as well
as more traditional keyword searches and formatting tests.
The key to SpamAssassin's success, though, is a smart VAR or IT person
installing it. SpamAssassin requires a significant amount of integration
work to make an enterprise-class installation succeed. Without a GUI,
database, quarantine, anti-virus scanner, policy or per-user
configuration, SpamAssassin is a great tool for those who want to build
their own anti-spam system, but is in no way a solution by itself.
This doesn't mean that SpamAssassin wasn't well represented in our test.
The important core of SpamAssassin, a Bayesian engine, was recognizable
in at least one-third of the products we tested and might well have been
hidden in the guts of more. The strategy of combining multiple tests to
identify spam is in nearly all modern, anti-spam products, including
SpamAssassin.
The difficulty in testing or recommending products that require heavy
engine training, or ones based on trained neural networks, is that
companies with many employees have very diverse mail flows, and the
training will likely generate false positives or negatives across large
numbers of users. For example, a multinational company might have many
employees who don't read or speak Italian, and might train all their
Italian mail as spam - something that would upset the Milan and Rome
offices. Or imagine IDG, which owns many publications, all which have
specialized vocabularies. No one set of training mail would work for the
different communities.
Products that successfully include a Bayesian recognizer, such as
SpamAssassin, do so by considering it as one factor in the larger
cocktail of spam identification. By weighting the Bayesian verdict with
other information, vendors have followed the trail that SpamAssassin
blazed and made it enterprise-ready."
On Mon, 2004-12-20 at 11:12 -0500, Theo Van Dinter wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 20, 2004 at 10:41:33AM -0500, Jerry Bell wrote:
> > Here's a bit on spamassassin:
> > http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2004/122004spamside6.html
> > It's a pretty disappointing article.
>
> Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an
> ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Re: Interesting NW article
Posted by Marco van den Bovenkamp <ma...@linuxgoeroe.dhs.org>.
Theo Van Dinter wrote:
> Very much so:
>
> Forbidden
>
> You don't have permission to access /reviews/2004/122004spamside6.html on this
> server.
>
> Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an
> ErrorDocument to handle the request.
?? Works here...
--
Regards,
Marco.
Re: Interesting NW article
Posted by Theo Van Dinter <fe...@kluge.net>.
On Mon, Dec 20, 2004 at 10:41:33AM -0500, Jerry Bell wrote:
> Here's a bit on spamassassin:
> http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2004/122004spamside6.html
> It's a pretty disappointing article.
Very much so:
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /reviews/2004/122004spamside6.html on this
server.
Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an
ErrorDocument to handle the request.
--
Randomly Generated Tagline:
As King Arthur said: Some days it all seems so feudal.
Re: Interesting NW article
Posted by Martin Hepworth <ma...@solid-state-logic.com>.
Interesting article...
Did anyone actually see the 'invite' they talk about??? I didn't see
anything on this list, or others.
--
Martin Hepworth
Snr Systems Administrator
Solid State Logic
Tel: +44 (0)1865 842300
Jerry Bell wrote:
> There's a big review of anti-spam products at nw fusion here:
> http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2004/122004spampkg.html?ts
> Here's a bit on spamassassin:
> http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2004/122004spamside6.html
>
> It's a pretty disappointing article.
>
> Jerry
> http://www.syslog.org
>
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