We have released to the public the beta for the new version of SpamFilter ISP v2.0. This release features statistical DNA fingerprinting of emails, which should allow greater accuracy in fighting SPAM.

The beta can be obtained from SpamFilter's download page at http://www.logsat.com/sfi-download.asp.

Please read the beta notes carefully. The first hundreds/thousands of emails received are critical in obtaining an accurate statistical database. It is important that when building your first database the number of false positives (good emails classified as spam) be kept at a minimum. For this reason it may be a good idea to start running the new version during the day, when there is usually a higher traffic of legitimate emails.

Roberto F.
LogSat Software

its a beta... :-)

is it possible to tweak it into an \\servername\sharename\corpusfilename.name ?

and have to servers share that ?

Performing realtime statistical analysis of emails is very process intensive. We fought hard to achieve an acceptable performance, and to do so we had to stay away from storing the corpus in a database.

In a certain way, it's not a bad thing to have different corpii for different servers. unless they are load-balanced, the backup smtp servers usually take a lower load, and only certain spammers will send email to them directly bypassing the primary smtp server. This causes the email arriving at the secondary to be statistically different from the email going to the primary. It is better in this case to have separate statistical data, as this will improve accuracy.

Roberto F.
LogSat Software

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

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?

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

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

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