Proving Which Spam Filters work Best

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Thanks Andareed for submitting this in Back page News on our forums.

Do spam filters work? Which is the best one? How might filters be improved? Without standards, one must depend on unreliable evidence, such as subjective impressions, testimonials, incomparable and unrepeatable measurements, and vendor claims for the answers to these questions.

You might think that your spam filter works well and couldn't be improved. Are you sure? You may think that the risk of losing important mail outweighs the benefit of using a filter. Could you convince someone who holds the other opinion? If I told you that my filter was 99-percent accurate, would you believe me? Would you know what I meant? Would you be able to translate that 99-percent into the risk of losing an important message?

Gord Cormack talk about the science, logistics, and politics of Spam Filter Evaluation.

Choose Video Format: MPG | XviD | DivX | OGG | RM | WMV | Size ~ 475 MB

Or view: Online Results & Conclusion .PDF

News source: Slashdot

#1 Exosphere on 03 Aug 2006 - 10:41

I've got to say Microsoft's Outlook junk filter is quite amazing (I've tried several other products in the past), it seems to capture about 95% of my spam and it's very rare to see a real email, only those image based spam emails get through.
I get around 100 spam emails per day, and the advantage to microsoft's own anti-spam is I can see them all filtered in the Junk folder, if it deleted before I could see them I'd be paranoid it may have deleted a real email.

(2 replies) #2 Beastage on 03 Aug 2006 - 11:18

Using Kaspersky 6 spam-filter for everything that isn't my gmail boxes
After some training results are pretty impressive about 95%-100% filteration but I think that nothing can beat gmails spam filter so far on both my gmail accounts the results are perfect , all spam filtered and no legit mails got into the spam folder.

#2.1 thingsforjason on 03 Aug 2006 - 17:40

Quote - Beastage said @ #2

...but I think that nothing can beat gmails spam filter so far on both my gmail accounts the results are perfect , all spam filtered and no legit mails got into the spam folder.

I get periodic spam in my inbox w/ the gmail filter. And i haven't even had the account for all that long!

#2.2 Jonathan2007 on 03 Aug 2006 - 21:24

I agree with you Beastage. My Gmail account gets quite a bit of spam and Google has caught just about everything so far. I am glad too. I don't want to deal with sorting out my regular emails from the spam ones.

#3 jeffjs on 03 Aug 2006 - 14:02

I am not smart enough to follow the equations found in the pdf.

(1 reply) #4 Andy-Roo on 03 Aug 2006 - 14:19

When things like this reach the news it kinda makes you proud to be a University of Waterloo student.

#4.1 PCyr on 03 Aug 2006 - 19:19

Especially one going for CS this fall.

(1 reply) #5 matric on 04 Aug 2006 - 00:30

For the love of god can the guy stand still for 1 second? The way he's staggering around, you would think he is drunk.

#5.1 Croquant on 04 Aug 2006 - 05:56

He's a statistical analysis researcher, not a professional presenter. Cut him some slack.

#6 Croquant on 04 Aug 2006 - 05:59

All my spam is filtered at the server. No Spam problems for me. Don't need to use personal spam filtering.
You get what you pay for when you choose an e-mail provider.

#7 Andareed on 04 Aug 2006 - 06:19

If anyone is interested in the bandwidth statistics, they're available here: http://noc.uwaterloo.ca/cn/Stats/intextbyd/day03. An MRTG graph is avaiable here: http://ist.uwaterloo.ca/cn/Stats/byhour.html.

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