VLUG Meeting Notes 2002.10.08

TOPIC: Filtering Spam - Spam Assassin.

Presenter: Steve Shack
mailto:sshack@steveshack.org

NEWS

• KDE spat between founders in the organization, questions about finances etc.
• Recent polls showing Apache Web Server still with a wide lead re installed base.
• Important Supreme Court case to be heard re copyright extension bids from the Studios.
• Kernal news: Freeze approaches re: 2.5 kernal. Dev. kernal 2.5.1 is underway.
• Linux Weekly News is now a subsciption service, and worthy of your support.
• Canadian call for comment invited re upcoming bills can be found through BC Chamber of Commerce website. Affects data storage and privacy issues for Canadians.
• Book raffle was held for 'Maximun Linux Security' by Sams.
• Also raffled was ' Network Intrusion Detection' by New Riders.

Monthly General Meeting:
Filtering Spam - Spam Assassin

PRESENTATION:

Generic Approaches:

1) Spam Assassin is a explicit rules based filtering package. It runs in conjunction with procmail. Options include setting the X-Spam status flag. You may also have it write a comment to the Message line. Spam feature scores are added together to create a final score.

Feature sets are updated regularly and available from http://spamassassin.taint.org
Also see: http://razor.sourceforge.net

2) Bayesian modelled applications. Entire text content is anaylized and counted and a comparison made to valid email. Traits or features are given values as versus mere header parsing, etc.

Long term solution: Use statistics. Use *your* email to generate statistics.

Resource:

www.paulgraham.com/spam.html

3) Bogofilter: Eric S. Raymond
Eskoo: Steve Shack
Statisically based filters using naive Bayesian approaches.

Ham list: Your received Good email

Spam list: Your received Bad email.

Necessary to generate a corpus of what You call Spam to *train* the app to differentiate. Is usefull because its based on *your* mail, not arbitrary 3rd party rules-based filters.

RESOURCES:

www.paulgraham.com/spam.html

http://razor.sourceforge.net

http://spamassassin.taint.org

Steve's meeting slides:

http://www.steveshack.org/articles/vlug/spam.html

This topic was very well received. Thank you Rockie for escorting VLUG mascot "Tux" the Penguin to the meeting tonight, and to Ken for volunteering to take it home.

Meeting Adjourned  to Boston Pizza for refreshments and conversation.

Next Meeting:

Where: University of Victoria, Cornet Rm. B - 143.
When: Nov.12/02.
Topic: TBA

Notes from Mark McLaughlin - VLUG Secretary.
secretary@vlug.org