Hi folks,
During last weeks we experienced an increasing amount of spam. This is annoying us. Until now I use Mercury's filtering ability by spambust.dat only. But therefore I have to maintain the spambust.dat regularly - and this means always running behind.
What are your experiences with Spamhalter, when working together with Mercury? How many Spam is nevertheless passing through or how many false positives are being filtered?
Further, I have read that Spamhalter is marking an affecred mail with "X-Spamhalter" only. But when Spamhalter do this, before Mercury's filtering rules will be applied or after? The background is: I would like to filter all the found spam out, and don't want to forward the spam (marked with X-Spamhalter) to my single user's mailboxes. But in case Spamhalter is checking after Mercury's filter rules applied, I have no chance to filter the spam out before it reaches my users.
Cheers
Joerg
Hi Joerg,
I use POPFile instead of Spamhalter but understand they both work the same way with very similar results. The spam tagging occurs before Mercury filtering. I filter to a directory named "Spam" which I have as an added mailbox in my Pegasus Mail folder list. I do some auto-delete filtering in Mercury but do more with an additional folder-open filter set in Pegasus Mail because I find it easier to add a rule there than in Mercury. I will be happy to share those with you.
I review then delete the spam several times a day (+2000/day with 13 users). During training you will see a significant number of false positive and failed detections but that number will drop quickly.
My POPFile classification accuracy since March 4, 2015:
Messages classified: 272,251
Classification error: 320
Accuracy: 99.88%
BTW, the only reason I use POPFile is because I had it in place and well trained before Spamhalter was added to Mercury.
Good Morning Brian,
I see, your first task in the morning is to check the Peg&Mercury Community Board. Great user [Y]
+2000 spam mails per day ! Wow, this is a huge amount. I'm talking about 100 to 200 spam mails for 13 users here. I will study POPFile right now and decide thereafter what to install, POPFile or SpamHalter. Thanks for the hint.
My filters delete more than half of it so reviewing the remainder is only a daunting task on Monday morning if I didn't IMAP in and do some cleaning.
Which reminds me, I started out filtering to a directory but now remember that I added a "Spam" user instead so I could access via IMAP on the weekend. This makes Monday morning easier.
I've got already an additional user "spam" where Mercury's spambust.dat filters to. This works fine so far. Every user is able to login in case he miss any mails.
But I have to check the usability with this one "spam" account because Spamhalter needs two different folders (or mail accounts?) where I have to forward either "not recognized spam" or "false positives" to. I have to study the manual a little bit more prior installing.
Now I have activated SPAMHALTER 4.5.1.411 within Mercury and have simultaneously deactivated spambust.dat. Will see ...
But one thing is confusing me: We've got already an account called "SPAM" where Mercury's spambust.dat sorted out all detected spam to. This folder has been checked regularly by me. Now (for Spamhalter) I have to set one account for SPAM and another account for NOSPAM. This is clear so far. Users should forward not recognized spam or false positives to those accounts for database learning.
But I thought I could still use my SPAM account also for the new Spamhalter SPAM account. But Spamhalter has removed all collected spam inside this account after a few minutes. Now we are not able to manually check the collected spam for correctness. I assume that the Spamhalter SPAM account is for Spamhalter database training only and when processed all mails therein are being deleted, isn't it? But in that case I need another account where Mercury moves the detected spam (mail header > X-SPAMHALTER: SPAM*) to, so that we are able to see and manually check it.
Unfortunately the Spamhalter manual doesn't explain this. Fro my point of view the entire manual should be overhauled a little bit. I'm aware that my English is not so good, but some sentences within the manual are not understandable for me [^o)]
George, I THINK the Spam and NOTSpam users are for training purposes only and that you can filter on the X-SPAMHALTER: SPAM header to move the messages to another user. I am not certain about that but give it a test and report back. I am very interested in your progress so as to learn more about Spamhalter.
Good Morning Brian,
At the moment it works. 12 mails filtered in the last hour, means Spamhalter has identified them as spam and has marked them in mail header with "X-SPAMHALTER: Spam detected!". In Mercury I have set a global filter rule which is checking the header for "X-SPAMHALTER: Spam*". When triggered, Mercury is moving the spam mail to another user, called "spam".
Now we have to wait how it works during next time. Keep you informed.
Hi Brian,
Short feedback to Spamhalter. Spamhalter is running now for 10 days without any problems. During this time about 300 spam mails have been sorted out to the separate user account SPAM. Since then my users get not more than 1-3 spam mails a day. They simply forward them to another local user account, called IS_SPAM. Spamhalter is regularly checking this account for learning. For the moment we are happy with.
Cheers and happy easter
