Your assuming most spammers are smart and are going to got the real technical route. In the long term, yes. Most of them are just in it for the short term buck, and if it's possible to block all the script-spammers with a dsl account, then sa is a good thing.
You mentioned that the update time was slow? Is it possible to divorce the scoring rules from the program and put them in a package that could be updated seperatelly? So every week or night or whatever, you download the new sa rule updates. Is this far fetched, or technically impossible? -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Dan Kohn Sent: Thursday, February 27, 2003 3:35 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [SAtalk] Odd score Tony L. Svanstrom wrote: > Well, the GA is working on getting the most caught with a minimum of > FPs, but it could do that without these negative scores; and at the > same time these rules are a weakness that will hit some people harder > than others. Not to mention that due to the delay between releases > these weaknesses might be (ab)used for weeks/months before they're > caught, and you mustn't forget that having these negative scores will > make it much easier for the more clever spammers to design their > e-mails to pass SA (maybe more or less killing the use of the bayesian > rules due to other rules giving the e-mails a negative score). The long-term complaint against SA is that employs bad evolutionary logic. Over time, SA will stamp out all the weak spammers (think of them as co-evolving parasites), and only the most resourceful ones will survive. An entire niche industry could spring up enabling spammers to pre-score their spams (and suggesting small changes) in such a way as to get through the largest number of SA installations. Note that the fact that Bayes runs differently on each site does create one form of genetic randomness across sites, reducing the chances that a given spam (no matter how carefully designed) will get through every SA installation. Similarly, no virus kills 100% of it's target hosts. Of course, as Keynes said, in the long run, we're all dead, and in the meantime, SA is by far the best anti-spam product ever created. - dan -- Dan Kohn <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://www.dankohn.com/> <tel:+1-650-327-2600> ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ Spamassassin-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ Spamassassin-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk
