Miles Fidelman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2002-09-28 07:59:30 -0400]: > On Fri, 27 Sep 2002, Bob Proulx wrote: > > list spews as the reason. All 105 were spam. That is an average of > > 21 per week, 3 a day, every day, with zero false positives. I also > > I get perhaps 1000 spams a day that are caught by spamassassin (2.20, > [...] > Of the 1000 spams that spamassassin catches, perhaps half are caught by > relays.osirusoft.com, and the other half by other rules. Unfortunately,
Note that this particular comparison is not strictly an apples to apples as I did not include statistics on spam that was not tagged by relays.osirusoft.com. There is a lot of that here too. But I was looking only at the RBL tagged data. > I've had the same email addresses for years, and am on tons of lists - so > my addresses get harvested a lot. Me too. But one way to have a low FP rate is not to have anyone send you mail. :-) Of course I am somewhat joking but, seriously, this is where the YMMV comes in and why my stats will be different than your and why yours will be different from someone else's. I get a significant amount of mail to my address but I am not currently running a business using that address, my business address is different. In the month of May, the last time I looked at all of the stats I got 609 spam messages to one address and 300+ spam messages to another. That is not close to your 1000 a day. Therefore I am not getting the volume of random input that you are undoubtedly seeing. My incoming mail mostly originates at large corporations, universities, larger ISPs which would generally not be in the colateral damage area. Therefore my data reflects that and for me the relays.osirusoft.com rbl is very effective and correlates well. > ii. a grep on osirusoft - which yields about 1/2 the messages - > but.. when there's a false positive, there's a really good chance that > it's in this group - and of this class of false positives, there's a close > to 100% liklihood that it's SPEWS that's given the false positive - i.e., > everything else that shows up in relays.osirusoft.com doesn't give false > positives Then you should definitely set the score for that low to zero and avoid using the RBL as a block on your mail hub. > But then, you might not notice it unless you're looking, and you have no > way of noticing when your messages don't get through at the other end! > That's the insidious nature of things. Unfortunately I believe that in the future people will become much more aware of the other end's spam filters. It is happening right now that messages don't always make it to their intended party. Everyone is getting inundated with spam. If someone gives me their address it is not uncommon for them to say, "Make the subject something that will let me know it is not spam, or I just delete it." This 'dealing with spam' and getting your message actually read is becoming a commonplace affair for everyone. I still remember when I got my first piece of unsolicited email from someone that I _did_not_personally_ know. That was an unheard of event! I was working on an HP s500 which was shared by a bunch of us. The mail connection was typical for the day, a UUCP connection. In those days it took effort to get an address working, and you just did not get an email from someone unless you had worked out the details ahead of time. I sat there stunned looking at the terminal at this advertisement. I knew the world had changed but of course was unable to predict how. I grabbed other folks in the office to show them the UCE message and they agreed that was an amazing happening. We had a good lunch time conversation about how the net was changing. Both for good and for bad but definitely changing. Bob
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