Spam, spam, spam, spam

[tinyjo]

I've suddenly started getting porn spam for some reason :( This means that I need some spam filtering. As I can't install spamassasin on my webhosts servers, any suggestions for good, preferably free, client side equivalents?

Comments

[blufive.livejournal.com]

Recent (1.3alpha onwards) mozilla builds have a pretty good bayesian spam detector built into mailnews. The "bin it automatically" feature isn't there yet, though you can run a filter manually to get the lot at one fell swoop. (alpha/beta software, might crash, yada, yada, yada)

[sparkymark.livejournal.com]

I don't know if the Mozilla one comes with a pre-filled database, but this technique (filtering on the words on existing spam to spot more spam) requires a corpus of spam, so start saving it in a folder rather than binning it so that when you have a Bayesian filter you have something to work with.

Incidentally the bloke with the patent on this algorithm was in the same class as Damian and me at college.

Don't enable a preview pane when dragging it: most contain a zero pixel graphic with your e-mail address in a query string that act as a read-receipt to the spammer when they check their server logs.

[blufive.livejournal.com]

Nope, no ready-made junkpile. But aquiring one shouldn't be a problem if you really need the filter. :(

re: zero-pixel graphics aka webbugs:
mozilla has an option to supress remote images in mail/news. Which is useful.

[sparkymark.livejournal.com]

The reason for getting a whole new world of spam may be that your address is now in an googlable Debian mailing list archive. Once everyone changes to using your new address you could start inbox-filtering on the "To: contains home@".

Jamie got caught by the Canada mailing list being archived without password protection in the same way.

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

Of course! I hadn't thought about that, or I would have thought twice about posting :(