Wed, 28 Oct 2009

Two Weeks of Dspam

It’s now two weeks since I setup dspam-3.9.0-BETA1 to handle my home network’s incoming email and it’s time for a review. I began by training dspam with a recent corpus of about 70k spam messages and 10k ham. Then I passed everything through dspam and checked its accuracy.

In my home situation, we can live with some missed spam turning up in our inboxes, but we can’t live with false positives. Dspam made one false positive out of 11,873 messages processed and that was in the first few hours. I’m ready to stop checking for false positives now and have started just dropping the spam on the floor.

Over the two weeks, I’ve only seen 17 spams per day out of the 435 that get delivered; and my wife has only seen 4 per day out of the 320 that are delivered for her. I’m calling this a great success and have decided that it’s sufficiently good that I don’t need to implement any other anti-spam measures at all.

The minor downside with the methodology I’m using is that any false positives will never be reported to anybody now that the testing phase is over. If anybody sends me a genuine email that dspam thinks is spam, I won’t see it and the sender won’t get a bounce. I can live with that.

Posted at: 15:16

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