Re: Brightmail

[jdow <jd...@earthlink.net>]

I think Earthlink uses Brightmail. If that is so then Brightmail
statistics are VERY bad. I doubt I had any false alarms - lost email.
But it only got about 75% or less of the spam. I used it while on the
road the last two weeks. I might comment that I was very unimpressed.

{^_^}
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gray, Richard" <ri...@dns.co.uk>


Brightmail seems to be getting a lot of good press on the SPAM front. 
 
So I'm wondering, why do people running large mail systems choose SA
over corporate offerings. Is it cost? Is it configurability, or
performance? 
 
Can anyone shed any light on how Brightmail achieves the rather
impressive statistics it is quoting, or do you think it is just smoke
and mirrors? 
 
Is it possible to reproduce the other features without spending the
cash?

Re: Brightmail

[jdow <jd...@earthlink.net>]

I enabled it. And as noted it seemed remarkably ineffective, particularly
as compared to SpamAssassin. I typically get 200 to 225 spams a day. Of
this a few get through with SpamAssassin because I do not use SURBL. So
about 3 or 4 a day sneak through. (It would be more without my custom
jd_mangy_mortgage rules I've been building up for "Mor t gage" "R at e"
spam.) Somebody needs to adapt the antidrug rules technology for anti-
mortgage spam. I'm not clever enough to do that one, I fear.

Anyway, I was seeing 20-30 with the spam blocker turned up to the "low"
setting that is not stupid enough to send "Are you really OK?" messages
to would be email senders. (I write those addresses into my procmailrc
file and dump them to /dev/null. I don't care to correspond to such
cretins. So I don't inflict it on others. They are trying to shift their
personal "wasted time" to someone else. This ain't "right". It's rude.)

There may have been something I missed setting it all up. But I was on
a dialup from Hell at Howard Johnson's outside the Orlando OCCC. Do NOT
go there. Their phone lines appear to work for modem access only during
the day, about 0830 to 1730. Outside those hours connections drop in a
matter of seconds, something I found HIGHLY suspicious. Anyway. that
made investigating setting it up in detail rather difficult.

{^_^}
----- Original Message ----- 
From: <mu...@myrealbox.com>

> On Tue, 30 Nov 2004 22:37:53 -0800, "jdow" <jd...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
> >I think Earthlink uses Brightmail. If that is so then Brightmail
> >statistics are VERY bad. I doubt I had any false alarms - lost email.
> >But it only got about 75% or less of the spam. I used it while on the
> >road the last two weeks. I might comment that I was very unimpressed.
> 
> Did you enable your filtering?
> I think that you have to enable it first from the Spamminator address.
> It's been ages since I had an Earthlink account, not sure if things are
> the same now.

Re: Brightmail

[Matt Kettler <mk...@evi-inc.com>]

At 06:06 PM 12/1/2004, multimedia-fan@myrealbox.com wrote:
> >I think Earthlink uses Brightmail. If that is so then Brightmail
> >statistics are VERY bad. I doubt I had any false alarms - lost email.
> >But it only got about 75% or less of the spam. I used it while on the
> >road the last two weeks. I might comment that I was very unimpressed.
>
>Did you enable your filtering?
>I think that you have to enable it first from the Spamminator address.
>It's been ages since I had an Earthlink account, not sure if things are
>the same now.

If it caught 75%, then apparently it's enabled.

My results on Brightmail with my home ISP since my last post in this thread 
are 3 FNs and 41 spams recognized. That's about 93.18% of the total spam 
caught, and a 6.82% FN rate.

But again, I've had absolutely zero FPs on it and have been using it for 
many months. 93% hit rate isn't great, but 0 FPs is always a good thing. 
Overall it's very comparable to SA 3.0.1's set3 performance with a 
threshold of 8.0, the lowest threshold that actually got 0 FPs in the last 
mass-check:

  SUMMARY for threshold 8.0:
# Correctly non-spam:  29452  100.00%
# Correctly spam:      26031  93.27%
# False positives:         0  0.00%
# False negatives:      1877  6.73%
# TCR(l=50): 14.868407  SpamRecall: 93.274%  SpamPrec: 100.000%


I guess my ISP has chosen a quite conservative setting for BM, which I 
guess I'd prefer to them choosing an overly-aggressive setting.

Re: Brightmail

[mu...@myrealbox.com]

On Tue, 30 Nov 2004 22:37:53 -0800, "jdow" <jd...@earthlink.net> wrote:

>I think Earthlink uses Brightmail. If that is so then Brightmail
>statistics are VERY bad. I doubt I had any false alarms - lost email.
>But it only got about 75% or less of the spam. I used it while on the
>road the last two weeks. I might comment that I was very unimpressed.

Did you enable your filtering?
I think that you have to enable it first from the Spamminator address.
It's been ages since I had an Earthlink account, not sure if things are
the same now.