Sunday, November 24, 2013

Vast Quantities of Spam

Reinstalling Thunderbird under Windows 7 means that it is starting over with spam rules to filter out spam.  The sheer quantity of this trash that was previously arriving and being Bayesian filtered away is astonishing; it is hard to distinguish from a weird form of denial of service attack.  I am beginning to see why a lot of people switch to gmail or other spam filtering oriented email systems.
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8 comments:

  1. John CunninghamNovember 25, 2013 at 9:36 AM

    I got my gmail account quite early, and I have enjoyed it ever since. web access is a great plus also when travelling, along with the spam filtering.

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  2. JLW IIINovember 25, 2013 at 9:58 AM

    T'bird and F'fox are pretty easy to move.

    1. Save your default profiles under:
    AppData\Roaming. The whole folder named gobbleygook.default.
    2. Install T'bird and F'fox on new computer. Open them to create the needed directories, and then shut them down.
    3. Move your saved stuff to the appropriate folder where Newgobbleygook.default is.
    4. Edit the profiles configuration file and change Newgobbleygook.default to gobbleygook.default.

    JLW III

    ReplyDelete
  3. SigivaldNovember 25, 2013 at 11:21 AM

    Where is your mailbox hosted that there isn't a spam filtering option?

    (Even if it's Some Random Linux Machine, there are Bayesian filters you can just drop in to sendmail/pop3d, I believe...)

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  4. Clayton CramerNovember 25, 2013 at 4:44 PM

    Sigivald:

    Yes, there is spam filtering on the mail server -- and the choice is a very high precision that throws away lots of legitimate email, or something a bit lower, which still lets in lots of spam.

    JLW III:

    Thanks for the information. I knew that there needed to be a way to do it, but I could not find it.

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  5. Clayton CramerNovember 25, 2013 at 8:48 PM

    JLW III: I have Thunderbird 24.1.1 -- but I do not see anywhere to save profiles.

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  6. Clayton CramerNovember 25, 2013 at 8:51 PM

    Here are the directions on saving profiles: http://email.about.com/od/mozillathunderbirdtips/qt/et_backup_prof.htm

    ReplyDelete
  7. SigivaldNovember 26, 2013 at 10:39 AM

    Interesting.

    Must be something that Gmail does with volume and learning that lets it be VERY good at only throwing out the dross...

    (Because it's quite rare that anything real gets thrown in the spam-bin for me, there.)

    ReplyDelete
  8. Clayton CramerNovember 26, 2013 at 11:47 AM

    As I understand Bayesian analysis, the more it learns, the better the results, probably with some sort of e-log graph. Whatever my Spam filter (at the server level and Thunderbird level) learns is based on hundreds of emails a day. Think of the volume of email that gmail must process each day, and how much it learns from it.

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