What about a web based interface?  Users could copy and paste the entire message into a page that would then dump the message into a table that SpamFilterISP would check on periodically.  It could easily be built into the same web interface that is in use now to check on quarantined messages... just submit the form - and viola!

There are a LOT of clients that (similar to Outlook) reformat the messages and strip out the original header information - 95% of my staff would have the same problem - and the plug-in wouldn't help us... (we decided against using ANY MS client years ago - and we have enjoyed NOT having most of the email virus headaches that many others have suffered through...)

Just a thought...

-Ric

Brian,

If an email is quarantined, and a user (or the admin thru the GUI) selects to force-deliver it, it will bypass all checks and be delivered no matter what.

Please note that the email will be temporarily save to the queue directory before being delivered. If the email contains a virus, if you have anti-virus software running it may delete it before SpamFilter can send it. SpamFilter caches emails on disk partly for this reason, to allow anti-virus software to catch/clean/delete and infected files. SpamFilter is designed not to "break" should an expected email file "disappear".

Roberto F.
LogSat Software

We've given this plenty of thought in the past. It would be very easy if the users could simply forward their spam to a special email address that SpamFilter know about.

Unfortunately the problem with that is the Outlook client. It reformats the emails so much that they are completely different at times as the original message. The header information is also stripped out.

Our plan is to create an Outlook plugin to be installed on the clients that will allow them the reporting of spam directly to SpamFilter, but it will be a few months before we can have something read for that.

Roberto F.
LogSat Software

Roberto -

Will you be developing a way to report false negatives?  My users are CONSTANTLY wanting to send me the SPAM that currently gets through the filter.

-Ric

Not exactly. At first, the statistical engine will determine what is good email and what is bad mail by looking at what the other filters SpamFilter uses do. As more and more emails are received, SpamFilter will adapt to the kind of email traffic and recognize more and more spam as it comes in. But during the initial training period, more or less the first 24 hours, it is important that the number of false positives be reduced to a minimum so the learining process is accurate. When an email is taken out of the quarantine, SpamFilter will know and will learn that similar emails are probably going to be legitimate.

Roberto F.
LogSat Software

Kevin,

The statistical filter kicks in when you receive 500good+500spam emails. It's accuracy will be very low at the beginning, but will improve dramatically as more emails arrive. This is a beta, so test are still ongoing, but we see than when the corpus reaches 2-4MB in size with a few thousand emails in each group, then it will catch spam at a regime rate.

Roberto F.
LogSat Software

From what I am understanding this new version sounds as if everything will be blocked until the users start forwarding in from their quarentine area the emails that are legit, am i reading this correct?

The dna filtering doesn't seem to be working for me.

It shows that it is scanning a message (19ms) for example, and that it is adding it to the bayes corpus file, but every message reads 0% spam and this includes spam messages.

I'm sitting at 863 forwarded messages and 1133 blocked.

Any ideas?

Ric,

We had thought of that at the beginning, but then discovered that each company/provider receives different emails. We may have 3-4 users who subscribe to a dating service. They're emails will cause the statistical database to "sway" in a certain way to accomodate their needs. This will cause very different results if the same database is used by another company ho instead could be a local government...

A very, very effective statistical corpus can be obtained from scratch just by having SpamFilter running for 24 hours. Once it's built, the corpus is tailored for that company and reflect pretty accuratle the kind of email traffic that is expected of it. There should be no need to import other user's results.

Roberto F.
LogSat Software