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No more dspam, now what?

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I was surprised at first to see that a long-standing bug in dspam had been fixed. Until that is, I realised it was from the Debian ftp masters and the reason the bug was closing was that dspam was being removed from the Debian archive.

 

Damn!

 

So, now what? What is a good replacement for dspam that is actually maintained? I don’t need anti-virus because mutt just ignores those sorts of things and besides youbankdetails.zip.exe doesn’t run too well on Debian. dspam basically used tokens to find common patterns of spam and ham, with you bouncing misses so it learnt from its mistakes. Already got postgrey running for greylisting so its really something that does the bayesan filtering.

 

Some intial comments:

  • bogfilter looks interesting and seems the closest thing so far
  • cluebringer aka policyd seems like a policy and bld type of spam filter, not bayesan
  • I’ve heard crm114 is good but hard to use
  • spamassasin – I used to use this, not sure why I stopped

There really is only me on the mailserver with a pretty light load so no need to worry about efficiencies.  Not sure if it matters but my MTA is postfix and I already use procmail for delivery.

 

 

Comments

13 responses to “No more dspam, now what?”

  1. Fabian Avatar
    Fabian

    I’d recommend bobofilter, it’s quite reliable if you train it from time to time.

    Reply
  2. Jeff Epler Avatar
    Jeff Epler

    I use spambayes, which is implemented in Python. You said that system load isn’t too important, but anyway “time” reports these statistics, filtering a single 2300-line message on a 3.4GHz AMD running debian 7 kfreebsd-amd64:

    0.34user 0.12system 0:00.46elapsed 99%CPU (12498avgtext+16400avgdata 14992maxresident)k
    4inputs+1outputs (0major+3060minor)pagefaults 0swaps

    spambayes is also not particularly active as a project, and I’m not sure of its health as a debian package, though it doesn’t have any bugs that affect me. I may have been using it for ten years now, it was written very shortly after the “discovery” of bayesian filtering as an effective antispam technique.

    Reply
  3. Steve Avatar
    Steve

    spambayes suffers from locking issues if multiple training events happen at the same time, sadly.

    Me? I’d recommend crm114. It does have a curve, but once it has been trained a little it works and it works well.

    Reply
  4. Craig Avatar
    Craig

    I’m trying spamassassin again. The initial view is that it is working very well. I’m pretty surprised how quickly it worked out what was spam from a small number of emails. Even the “I’m not sure, but I think it is spam” folder was all spam.

    Reply
  5. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    crm114. It’s not that hard but it works Very well. Set up a folder in your $HOME such as ~/mail, Copy mailreaver.crm and mailfilter.cf into it, edit the latter and read the comments. Run it and it will fail, complying about missing priolist.mfp or spam.css similar. Create a blank one/empty CSS files with cssutil. Rinse and repeat until it stops complaining. Use procmai to invoke it or an exim rule of some sort.

    Reply
  6. mirabilos Avatar
    mirabilos

    I’m using bmf myself. https://packages.debian.org/sid/bmf seems to be it, although I don’t have bmfconv on my MTA (which runs MirBSD, not Debian). Happy with it.

    Reply

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