Thoughts on Spam Filter Quality

Posted on:May 26 2008

I am very satisfied with the built-in junk mail filter in the Windows Mail client - the Outlook Express version which comes with Vista. It significantly outperforms Thunderbird or SpamAssassin (at least in that default configuration when I used it about a year ago the last time), from my subjective impression.
It identifies about 99.9% of all my spam correctly as junk mail. But HOW ON EARTH are these Viagra guys doing this? All of the 'Viagra 100mg xy Dollars Per Pill price' and similar are getting through. I mean a spam filter today should have 'viagra' set as one of the top keywords making a mail looking suspicious ;) But anyway, nice job Windows Mail, so far.





Comments:


because they use pictures instead of text
Pad
Quote
2008-05-26 17:43:00


nope, there are no images in mine, just a 'buy now!' text and even a normal link to their website.
niko
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2008-05-26 17:50:00


They paid Micro$oft.
trunks14
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2008-05-26 20:12:00


I think it is because the recipient is not your own email address but a fictive one. This seems to mislead all filters.
I am seeing more of this type of spam since a couple of weeks.
evo
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2008-05-26 21:24:00


I wish their live/hotmail email spam filter was as good :/ It seems to let 99.9% spam through.
xDan
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2008-05-28 10:49:00


gmail has the best spam filters of any mail clients that I've used, but it too lets a few in occasionally.
ecsos
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2008-06-03 20:50:00


Personally I find SpamAssassin and Thunderbird very good, but then I've trained mine for years :) The out-of-the-box configuration is not as good, maybe Windows Mail is pre-trained better (I don't like Vista very much so I don't use it often enough to try). GMail is arguably better, but I have had it misidentify genuine mails as spam more often too.
Steve
Quote
2008-06-09 10:21:00


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