Training My Spamato Spam Filter
Posted on | July 23, 2007 | 3 Comments
Months ago, I threw in the towel with my old Spam filter, SpamFire. It was apparently written in RealBasic, and so it was slow and constantly got “stuck.” I’d rather have spam than have to be constantly nursing a memory hog, finicky application.
Finally I got fed up with my spam problem this morning and I’m trying something new. 95% Spam is just too much to handle.
Spamato
Spamato is an interesting Spam filter solution. It works by having a set of filters which all look at the mail and then sort of vote on whether it is to be considered spam. When training the filter, I notice that commonly three of the eight filters will hit most of my obvious spam. After training is done, presumably more will hit.
I’m using the Spamatoxy mail proxy filter, rather than the Thunderbird plugin because of OSX compatibility problems. Still, it is quite easy to set up, and training is only one step more difficult than it would be with a full integration.
Training
I have seven accounts I actively check. One of them is IMAP, the rest are POP. So, I set up my IMAP filter to use a spam folder as a “smart mailbox.” All IMAP spam goes into that folder, and if I manually drag a file there, it gets reported to Spamato as a spam, the reverse is true as well, if I drag one out, then it is “revoked” and is not considered spam.
To train it, I just dragged a few hundred junk mails from my local junk mail directory into my IMAP inbox. I made sure all were marked *spam*, then I cleared my spam folder. to train for good mail, I dragged a few hundred good mails from local folders to the IMAP inbox, and then made sure none of them were tagged as spam. A few dozen were, but it was no bother to revoke the spam dermination.
After doing that, my Bayesian filter should be active. I’m curious to see how much better the system gets with the Bayesian filter active.
Technorati Tags: spam, spamato, spamatoxy, spamfire
Comments
3 Responses to “Training My Spamato Spam Filter”
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August 5th, 2007 @ 5:33 am
would you be able to give some details as to how you setup the “smart mailbox” that automatically reported and revoked spam to spamato?
thanks
August 5th, 2007 @ 12:36 pm
Sure, actually I didn’t have to do anything at all clever to get it to work.
The auto spam folder only works if you are using IMAP. To enable it, go to the Spamatoxy “proxy” page.
“imap.spamfolder” put whatever you want to name your spam folder. I use “spam”
Then go to mail and resync the folder. You should see a new subfolder “spam”, which is where all your spam for that account will now go.
That done, you can mark something spam, and inform Spamato of your judgement by dragging mail into that box. Also you can drag something out, which auto-revokes it.
?April 14th, 2008 @ 6:57 am
Hello and appreciate the article! My choice is Gafana.com – I’ve used since November 2007 and all I can say – it’s the best anti-spam solution on market. From the moment I started using it and till now I didn’t get a single spam letter! This is just unbelieveable for me… And I also didn’t lose any of the letters because none of the letters was taken for spam – the system worked next to perfect! That’s why I would like to tell everyone about it and suggest using this mail client.